Underwood

The town the highway almost skips — and why it's worth the turn.

A Block Off the Bypass

Underwood sits on a low rise above the Missouri River valley in central McLean County, a small grid of streets that most drivers passing on US 83 never quite register. The highway skirts the east edge of town, close enough to see the water tower, not close enough to pull you in. That slight distance is part of why Underwood still feels like itself.

Turn west off the highway and you hit a real main street — not a strip of chain businesses facing the road, but an actual downtown block with brick storefronts and the compressed, functional architecture of a Northern Plains town that grew up around grain, coal, and the railroad that once connected both. The grain elevators are the first thing to read on the skyline: Underwood has them, and they're working, not decorative.

The town serves a wide stretch of county that includes farms running north toward Garrison, and it sits close enough to the lignite country around Washburn and Underwood's own immediate vicinity that the coal industry has always been part of the local economy. The Falkirk Mine, one of the larger surface lignite operations in the region, lies nearby, and the scale of those excavations — visible from certain county roads — is worth understanding before you write off central North Dakota as flat and featureless.

For the traveler, Underwood offers what the bypass towns never do: a chance to stop somewhere that wasn't built for stopping. A locally run café, a bar, a hardware or implement business still operating on a corner lot. The streets are wide in the old Dakota-town way, laid out for grain wagons and angled parking that still makes sense. The courthouse square feel is present even without a courthouse — this is a county-seat-adjacent town with a tidy civic self-regard.

The Missouri River valley is close. Drop west from Underwood and the land breaks open; you're into the bluffs and draws that the flat fields above don't prepare you for. That terrain — cut by coulees, spotted with old homestead sites — is the other Underwood, the one most visitors never reach.

It won't take long. The whole main street is a short walk, and there's no performance to it. That's the point.