Unique staircases and walls in our mountainous Black Hills towns are both practical and charming
By Paul Higbee
AS AN 8-year-old I envied Hot Springs kids. Visiting from Iowa, I always noticed where children in other towns walked to and from school. Hot Springs had built-in adventure. There were sidewalks along a steaming river and a long flight of stone steps from downtown to a hilltop school overlooking town.
I imagined enrolling at Hot Springs and bounding up those stairs like a mountain goat every morning and then, at 3, leaping down three steps at a time with plenty of hang time, like a hawk dropping back to earth.
Southwestern South Dakota had three things my region of Iowa didn’t: thermal springs, contrasting elevations to negotiate, and a ready supply of pink sandstone with which to build. In the late 19th century Fred Evans and others quarried that sandstone for distant markets, but kept much of it for shaping their town. Hotels, hospitals, sanitariums and covered pools were created, making Hot Springs what we’d call today a medical tourism destination. People from everywhere, with a wide range of ailments, arrived by train seeking remedies in naturally warm waters.
“An important part of her work in healing the sick and recreating the tired vacationist is that she should always appear trim and smiling,” wrote poet and historian Badger Clark in his classic When Hot Springs was a Pup. “Beauty is her business.” The soft glow of pink sandstone contributed to that, whether worked into the architecture of the incredible Evans Hotel or State Soldiers Home, or into something as practical as a retaining wall or exterior stairway that moved patients from hotel lodgings to therapy.
There’s a price to pay for beauty, though. Mayor Bob Nelson reports the two oldest stairways have been city maintenance challenges for a long time. “Because of their deteriorating condition, the city has closed these sets of stairs for safety reasons,” he says, but that doesn’t mean they’re abandoned. Hot Springs hired a firm to look at the design and cost of replacing the steps, with the idea being to keep the original look and feel. “It’s early in the process,” Nelson says, but the firm’s report will put Hot Springs “in a better position to look for grant opportunities to help fund the replacement of the stairs.”
Challenge Dakota is a nonprofit organization that works with the city to raise funds for supporting stair repairs and future renovations. And decades after I wished to join the ranks of Hot Springs youth utilizing the steps, Challenge Dakota encourages people of all ages to climb them for fitness. “Stairs, Stripes & Steps” is an annual springtime race. In recent years a much more solemn event, the “9/11 Grand Stairway Challenge,” has seen about 100 climbers move up and down that particular set of stairs 15 times each September 11. That matches the number New York firefighters climbed during the 2001 World Trade Center attack. The rigorous ritual memorializes 343 firefighters who died that day.
The summer I first encountered Hot Springs, my family also visited the northern Black Hills towns of Lead and Deadwood — places similarly built for negotiating steep climbs daily. Moving down Lead’s Main Street in our station wagon, I noticed stairs that connected side streets layered on top of one another, and more noticeable than yards in front of homes were rock walls. Each wall had an entrance from street level, and often beyond the entrance stone stairs climbed to the home’s front door. The walls, of course, were retaining walls so that yards and houses wouldn’t slide away. I also noticed garages cut into hillsides. Knowing the town was home to a big gold mine, I imagined some of the garages might be back entrances into the mine. Often these garages — mostly gone now — were built in small clusters adjacent to a stairway that climbed to hillside homes.
“There were some long climbs,” says lifelong Lead resident Bob Phillips. From Main Street, in several locations, stairs moved pedestrians up and down both sides of Lead’s gulch as far as there were houses. An exceptionally long flight began near the Kirk power plant outside town, led over a mountain, and into Lead. It’s possible no other town in the United States claimed more outdoor steps per capita if mine shafts could be considered outdoors. Homestake Gold Mine’s Ross and Yates elevator shafts, dropping thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface, had stairs running the entire distance for emergencies and maintenance. On the surface, the mining company was no less prolific, linking its hillside refineries, stamp mills, and other industrial buildings with outdoor stairways.
Homestake always embraced innovation and so did Lead. Early in the 20th century, the community began replacing its wooden steps with concrete ones. “There were flat platforms in spots where you could catch your breath,” Phillips recalls, “and in places where it was possible, the stairs broke for sections of inclined sidewalk. In steeper areas we had what we called baby steps.” Baby steps weren’t designed for toddlers, but for anyone who could climb more easily up stairs that were full-sized except for a shallower vertical lift per step.
There were no baby steps built into a famous flight that climbed from Lead High School’s locker rooms to Mountain Top Field, an athletic venue created by slicing off the top of an adjacent ridge. Playing high school football in the thin air of mile-high Lead could challenge athletes from lower elevations, and the pre-game climb to the field didn’t help. But for local players, Phillips says, “it was your way of loosening up.” Lead and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) took action to prevent erosion off the mountain by building a retaining wall, a couple stories tall and a football field in length, in 1938.
Deadwood, in its storied gulch a couple miles down the road from Lead, is one of the country’s best examples of valuing and preserving sets of hillside stairs and native stone retaining walls. Deadwood and Lead, much more than Hot Springs, developed as gritty gold-prospecting towns turned blue-collar industrial communities featuring mines as well as ore processing mills. Nobody said beauty was their business. Yet both are remarkably pretty, and not only because of their natural settings. These were also places where stone architecture shaped the communities, some of it created by immigrants drawn to gold country who traced their skill to Old World family trades. Most Deadwood building stone, in contrast to pink sandstone of the southern Hills, is what the partisan Badger Clark would have dismissed as plain brown or even as dried beef liver in color. It came from the geological feature called the Deadwood Formation. It’s actually no less eye-catching than Hot Springs’ rock. Retaining walls define narrow streets above Main and have inspired artistry. Look for stones arranged to resemble a lizard on Denver Street, along with a likeness of Deadwood and Galena’s famous historical pet, the coyote Tootsie. Both images, subtle rather than in-your-face, were created by stone-worker Marvin Lehman.
“Most retaining walls in Deadwood are the properties of homeowners, who are responsible for them,” says Deadwood Historic Preservation Officer Kevin Kuchenbecker. “A wall serves a function but probably doesn’t increase a home’s value. But it will hurt it if it fails.” Fortunately for homeowners, the city will pay a large percentage of a wall’s replacement (work that is put up for a public bid and must involve an engineer if the wall exceeds 4 feet in height). “Right now,” Kuchenbecker says, “I’ve got about 25 walls on a waiting list and usually I have funding for four a year.” If a retaining wall fails, however, it leap-frogs to the top of the list.
City funding for retaining wall maintenance and repair is generated from Deadwood gaming revenues. In addition to private property walls, Deadwood takes care of those found in its historic cemeteries, Mount Moriah and St. Ambrose. Both were developed on steep hillsides. “Shifting ground that could affect the positions of caskets would be a disaster,” Kuchenbecker says. In addition to eliminating that potential nightmarish scenario, the cemetery work has spruced up both burying grounds visually.
As is true for all historic preservation projects, knowing as much as possible about a property’s background is important. Michael Runge, city archivist and collections manager, says a key tool for that is a set of Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps dating from 1885 to 1948. A glance at versions of the maps through the years reveals what structures survive and even what materials were used. Overlaying old maps with images of today shows most (but not all) stair routes are the same, although actual stairways have evolved from wood to steel. There are retaining walls now, however, that appear just as they were described more than a century ago.
Runge has turned to other historical sources, too. He admires author Estelline Bennett who moved to Deadwood with her family as a girl in 1877 and had her wonderfully descriptive book, Old Deadwood Days, published in 1928. Williams Street, a quiet residential neighborhood where her family lived, ran parallel to raucous Main Street and a level above it. Still, wrote Bennett, “stairways came up inquiringly from the gulch.” She could hear dance hall music from below, struggled to understand what prostitutes did, and was actually intrigued by gamblers. Guarded by her dog, Danger, Bennett felt safe running errands — even down the Wall Street stairs where “in its steep ascent ran the whole gamut of human morals.”
Deadwood visitors can retrace Estelline Bennett’s steps, up today’s steel version of the Wall Street stairs and onto Williams Street, still a quiet residential avenue. It’s a pedestrian “urban trail” experience, Kuchenbecker says, a good way for drivers who don’t like the narrow streets to park and see the full community. There’s historic signage and free guide maps throughout town (with suggested walks for Lead, too).
“We get archeologists involved in the work because often we uncover objects with historic value,” Runge says. It’s entirely possible to encounter contractors, repairing or reinforcing walls on those walks, because the effort is ongoing.
RCS Construction of Rapid City has successfully bid on many walls over the years. “I started working for RCS in 1999,” says Barry Wood, “and I’ve done one or two walls a year since. Every one is unique in its own fashion but they do the same work, holding up a house or a street. Back when many of these were built, miners or cowboys came in by horses with no equipment to move huge boulders. But they got the job done.”
Wall restoration typically involves gutting the interior, where rock is most likely to draw moisture that can eventually lead to failure. Interior rock is replaced with concrete, poured or block, and the concrete is enmeshed in fabric to prevent it from melding into the soil. The surface rock, or veneer, is put back in place and in the event some of the veneer has been damaged, Deadwood usually has a stockpile of historically authentic wall stones.
“I really enjoy working in Deadwood,” Wood says. “There’s a unique aura because of the history.”
I sensed that, too, on my first childhood visit. The feeling has drawn me back ever since.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.