North Dakota was laid down at the Fore River Shipyard in December 1907, was launched in November 1908, and commissioned into the US Navy in April 1910.

After the United States entered World War I in April 1917, North Dakota remained in the US, training crewmen for the rapidly expanding wartime Navy, and therefore did not see combat.

She remained on active duty through the early 1920s, until she was decommissioned under the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty in November 1923, and converted into a radio-controlled target ship.

The ship was powered by two-shaft Curtis steam turbines and fourteen coal-fired Babcock & Wilcox boilers, generating a top speed of 21 knots.

On 1 January 1913, she joined the honor escort for the British armored cruiser HMS Natal, which was carrying the remains of Whitelaw Reid, the United States Ambassador to Great Britain.

[6] The United States remained neutral when war in Europe broke out in August 1914; in the Americas, political disturbances in Mexico during that country's revolution kept the US Navy occupied that year.

[6] North Dakota was conducting gunnery training in Chesapeake Bay when the United States declared war on Germany on 6 April 1917.

[11] On 13 November 1919, North Dakota left Norfolk, carrying the remains of the Italian Ambassador to the United States, Vincenzo Macchi di Cellere, who had died 20 October in Washington, D.C.

[6] In the years immediately following the end of the war, the United States, Britain, and Japan all launched huge naval construction programs.

[12] Under the terms of Article II of the treaty, North Dakota and her sister Delaware were to be scrapped as soon as the new battleships Colorado and West Virginia, then under construction, were ready to join the fleet.

She was stricken from the Naval Vessel Register on 7 January 1931 and sold to the Union Shipbuilding Company of Baltimore on 16 March 1931 for dismantling.