08/08/2026
Excerpt from the book “Lookin Back”
Thomas Donald Campell by Carolyn R. Riebeth
Thomas D. Campbell was born, 1882, on what later became one of the big “Bonanza farms of the Red River Valley, North Dakota. The farmhouse, now a museum of the Grand Forks Historical Society, was restored with funds left by Mr. Campbell. Ehen removing the siding from the old house, workmen found a log cabin beneath part of it.
In 1906 he married Bess Bull, a childhood classmate, whose father was founder of the Cream of Wheat Company. Their first child, a son, died at three. The other children were three daughters. Because of Bess’s health, the Campbells left North Dakota and established a home in California. She could not live in a cold climate. Still, after her husband’s enterprise had begun in Montana, during WWI, she and the children spent the warm months at a ranch north of Hardin.
When the war began, Mr. Campbell considering the Allies urgent need of food and being an agriculturist, went to President Wilson suggesting that some tracts of Government land in Montana might become large scale, mechanized, dry land farms. So, Tom Campbell became the father of this kind of farming. The President sent him to Secretary of the Interior Lane, with whom he scoured Montana, looking for the right land. This they found on the Fort Peck and Crow Reservations. The project, first called the Montana Farming Corporation, approved by the Government, but financed by J.P. Morgan was launched in 1917 on the Crow Reservation.
In 1918, this undertaking became the Campbell Farming Corporation, largest wheat farm in the world, which at its peak, farmed 95,000 acres.
Long before WWII, foreign governments had noted Tom Campbell’s work. In 1929, during Russia’s famine, that government had sough his advice about a program for grain production. This ultimately led to the formation of the giant farms, Campbell went to Russia three times, and wrote the book Russia, Market or Menace? Before the war, Winston Churchill had invited him to be a consultant on problems of raising grain enough to make Great Britain self-sufficient.
Entering the U.S. Air Force as a colonel, he took part in the North African campaign. He was in Italy and the South Pacific and worked on the Burma Road. The last year of the war, he became a brigadier general and then retired. In 1948, the French government asked him to help them plan for extensive, mechanized agriculture to make North Africa the breadbasket of France.
After the war, until his death in Pasadena, 1969, Tom Campbell was in Hardin part of each year. Every summer, when his old friends the harvesters returned, the reunion in his office was warm and gay. Forty years ago, his Stutz Bearcat was a familiar sight in these parts. Now it’s a sheltered relic of the tall man with the gracious manners, who used to drive it.
