On the North Dakota prairie, a few families built what is often called the first building in the United States made to be a mosque.
It stood near Ross, a village of about a hundred people. The builders were homesteaders from what is now Lebanon, who began claiming land here in the early 1900s, drawn by the offer of 160 acres.
They prayed together in each other's homes, led by educated laymen, and sheikhs sometimes visited from Canada.
Around 1929 they built a mosque of concrete, long, low and half sunk into the ground. Accounts say it was meant to be the basement of a larger building, and that the Great Depression stopped the plan.
It served the community into the 1960s. Then families moved away, the building fell into disrepair, and by 1979 it had been taken down.
In 2005 a local family built a small domed mosque on the same spot, as a memorial. Beside it, the prairie cemetery is still in use, and in 2018 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Is it truly the first? Many sources say so, but accounts differ, because earlier groups prayed in homes and rented rooms, and other early mosques have their own claims.