Category: travel

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South Dakota’s Stockholm

By Chad Coppess

Steve Misener is known around the world for his historic piano collection and the knowledge he’s accumulated from years of research into piano history.

Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, is built on 14 islands and features more than 50 bridges. South Dakota’s Stockholm sits on a small hilltop in the Coteau Des Prairies roughly 15 miles from Minnesota. Stockholm was never very large — maybe 150 people at its peak in the 1920s — but longtime residents are still proud it survives as a bedroom community for nearby Milbank and Watertown.

The town’s Swedish roots can be seen in yard and house decorations and displayed inside Alice’s Restaurant. These days, Stockholm is known for its Buggy Museum and Steve Misener’s vintage piano collection.

This corner of South Dakota has a long history of dairy farming. Lifelong resident Arlo Levisen’s grandfather was a butter maker, and the Stockholm creamery was in business until the 1960s when area dairy farmers began supplying the rapidly growing Valley Queen Cheese in Milbank. Smaller operations couldn’t keep up.

“The school closed in 1970,” Levisen says.”My mom was the last teacher.”

Education is a decades-long family tradition for the Levisens and Arlo is proud to say he finished his career as the superintendent of the school where his mother graduated.

Alex”Richard” Thompson and son Alex”Richie” Jr. own Alice’s Restaurant on Main Street. Locals gather here for lively morning conversations and to roll dice to see who pays for the coffee. The restaurant was originally built as a hotel for salesmen traveling on the railroad. There are still five rooms upstairs, but they aren’t advertised; they are mainly used when a wedding or some other gathering happens in town.

Following local tradition, women still sit in the north dining room and men in the south.”You’ll need your hip boots over on that side,” the women laugh about their spouses’ penchant for telling tall tales. Some describe mornings here as a”therapy session.” Monthly birthday parties for the regulars include cake and singing.

Thompson Sr. remembers that Stockholm”used to be a going concern, but just kind of dribbled away over the years.” The town never had a theater, but summer Saturday nights included movies projected on the large white door of the lumber yard for the audience in lawn chairs.

The Stockholm Agricultural Museum is a collection of 12 buildings, with the Buggy Museum being the newest.

Religion has been a strong part of the town from the start and Judy Dorman Rieke is proud that the town has always been dry.”It just goes to show a town can make it without booze,” she said. Various traditional Swedish churches, aspects of Dakota culture, and newer versions of Hutterite and Amish cultures blend here.

A collection of 12 buildings comprises the Stockholm Agricultural Museum under the auspices of the Grant County Historical Society, with the Buggy Museum being the newest. A 2008 windstorm that damaged buildings and a few buggies inspired Levisen and others to put up a new building and collect more buggies and sleighs from the area.

Levisen says the project was funded by David Johnson, nephew of longtime Stockholm area farmer Henry Fogelberg. Several buggies have been completely restored, while some were in good enough shape to display in their donated conditions. Highlights in the collection of 19 vehicles include a horse-drawn hearse provided by the Mundwiler Funeral Home in Milbank and a Russian-Canadian sleigh. Most came from within 50 miles of Stockholm.”All these buggies have a connection to this area,” Levisen says.

Across Main Street from Alice’s Restaurant is the former Stockholm grocery store, now home to Steve Misener’s Piano Shoppe.”Welcome to the center of the music world in Stockholm,” he laughed as he opened the door.

“The collection of antique pianos is where my passion really lies,” he explained, but he’s also known for instrument tuning and repair. He has traveled between Chicago, Minneapolis and Denver tuning pianos.

Misener is happy to show his collection of 130 major instruments to anyone who calls ahead. Even though some are stored and covered, he can easily give you details on each piece’s history. A walk through is a history lesson and demonstration of the knowledge collected in Misener’s memory.”My 1574 organ is one of the oldest in North America,” he said.

“This is a Broadwood,” he said, pointing to another.”Beethoven had one.” He paused when asked about the newest piece in his collection before deciding it is a 1940 model.

Arlo and Paulette Levisen have played a large role in creating Stockholm’s Buggy Museum.

Tracking the history of the pianos has become a passion as well. Using serial numbers, sales receipts, newspaper accounts of concert performances, and passports assigned to instruments that traveled overseas, he’s been able to document the lives of several of the pianos in his collection.”What’s the story? Who owned this? Who played it? It’s just fascinating,” he said.”The detective work is fun.”

He bills one of his pianos as”the piano that Brahms nearly played.” Famous German composer and pianist Johannes Brahms was scheduled to perform on it but became ill and did not play. Another he has connected to a story of the hiding of the Liberty Bell from British troops in Philadelphia.

As Misener built his collection he sought out experts in the field with questions.”About 10 years ago I realized the questions were beginning to come to me. I had never seen myself as the go-to person, but I guess it has come to that.”

Occasional performances and history presentations for schools mean Misener’s pianos do get played if their condition allows. Some are kept as historic pieces past their musical prime.

Levisen is working to bring more visitors to Stockholm and especially to the Buggy Museum. A series of special events has already created interest, including a Burger Battle in June.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Home Run for Columbia

By Chad Coppess

Columbia’s ball field and park were the impetus for citywide refurbishments.

Community spirit. Most South Dakota towns have it, but it would be hard to find one with more than Columbia, 19 miles northeast of Aberdeen. That’s largely thanks to philanthropist Dean Buntrock, who has pumped large amounts of enthusiasm into his hometown.

Buntrock, 92, fondly remembers the days in the 1940s and’50s when his father owned the International Harvester dealership and was mayor of Columbia.”He sold everything a farmer could need and I first started working there, if you could call it working,” he chuckled.”After the second World War, a lot of new things developed in farm machinery, so we had lots to sell.” That experience led Buntrock to become a successful businessman and a founder of Waste Management, Inc., a nationwide waste and environmental services company now headquartered in Houston, Texas.

Baseball has been an important part of Columbia for decades and became a focus of Buntrock’s hometown philanthropy.”When we were kids, if you had a bicycle, a baseball glove and a baseball bat, that’s all you needed,” Buntrock says. City councilman Cole Kampa agrees.”Columbia is built around baseball. As kids, that ballpark was the center of everything, even where we went to go fishing.”

Columbia’s ballpark is called Wahl Memorial Field, named for Kermit Wahl, a Major League Baseball player who grew up here. He spent time as an infielder for the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Browns from 1944 to 1951. He died in Arizona in 1987 and is buried at Columbia’s Lakeview Cemetery.

The ballpark, framed by huge trees along the banks of the James River, was widely regarded as one of the most beautiful places in the region to play. Unfortunately, that picturesque spot also meant flooding during spring seasons when the unruly Jim overflowed its banks.

When approached with an idea for refurbishing the Columbia baseball field, Buntrock offered a donation and assistance, but wanted to do more.”I said the town needs a place to gather for picnics and things like that also,” he says. The project grew to include a relocated ballfield and greatly expanded city park.

Karen Kampa and her husband Tyler have renovated Karen’s Bar and Grill and filled it with antiques and Columbia memorabilia.

He placed good friend Terry Birck in charge of working with the community and told him,”If we’re going to do it, let’s do a good job.” Birck found additional funding sources through the state of South Dakota and, Buntrock says,”It’s quadrupled what I had ever expected.” The Columbia Community Foundation was established and is providing permanent funding for the park and other area charities.

“Dean understood that rural communities don’t have a lot of money,” Birck says.”He didn’t want it to be a Dean Buntrock project though, but a community project. The South Dakota Community Foundation was a great find. With their help this became a Columbia initiative. The gift of the park was the catalyst that got things percolating.”

The monetary gifts have spurred many projects to spruce up this tiny Brown County town. Buildings have been purchased and resold, repurposed and more. Two citywide cleanup days also made homeowners aware of grant programs that could provide things like new siding and roofing.”The cleanup days were so fun because of the connections made,” says Julie Lillis, a member of the Columbia Community Foundation.”It’s so energizing to meet people you’ve waved at, but you didn’t really know.”

Karen and Tyler Kampa reopened the old log cabin bar as Karen’s Bar and Grill in early 2023. Tyler’s love of antiques has filled the place with interesting memorabilia.

Tyler’s mother, Cheryl Kampa, is a longtime daycare provider who many Columbia residents remember as a second mother figure.”Karen’s has become an attraction for at least a 20-mile radius,” she says.

After 43 years Cheryl has turned over the daycare to neighbor Emily Eichler, a transplant who said her first week in Columbia made her feel more at home than anywhere else. She is now also a city council member. Buntrock offered to build a daycare center, but Eichler is happy to be at home.”I’m glad to be able to do my laundry while still at work,” she says.

Emily Eichler runs Columbia’s daycare, which serves the surrounding countryside and other small neighboring communities.

There’s plenty of work for Eichler.”For the size of our town we have a lot of little kids,” she says. Census stats back that up, indicating that Columbia’s median age is 33.2, fairly low for a small community in farm country. The daycare has 17 enrolled children with some coming from Claremont, 18 miles away.

Cole Kampa said the new city park, which encompasses several city blocks, has created the recreational gathering site that Buntrock envisioned.”Kids can walk or ride their bikes to the park without worry.”

In the 1800s, riverboats plied the James River south from Jamestown, North Dakota, with dreams of connecting to Yankton and the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. The dock on the west side of Columbia spurred the building of three grand hotels, Cole Kampa said. The hotels are gone, and the river is no longer deep enough here to support a large boat, but the riverboat era is remembered around town.

Mohr Honey, on the north edge of Columbia, was quickly born when someone suggested to Dana Mohr that he should look at some books about beekeeping.”The first year we had eight pints of honey. We failed miserably,” Mohr laughs.”There is a real, real learning curve.” Fortunately, Mohr and his bees eventually found their rhythm. He and wife Lisa harvested 1,400 gallons from 100 beehives in 2023. Mohr Honey is now sold in 15 retail outlets as far away as Rapid City. The couple donates bottles of honey as prizes for community events and gives educational talks at area schools.

At age 95, Lloyd Dennert is happy to be Columbia’s oldest resident, and his wife Doris is right behind him. When Doris was born in Columbia during the winter of 1932, she and her mother stayed in town for a week until her father came to get them in a horse-drawn sleigh. The Dennerts laughed about Halloween pranks like tipping over outhouses and remembered watching movies projected on the side of a barn in town.

Despite the large donations coming from Buntrock, the United Church of Christ and others, community members have resisted the temptation to spend wildly.”You’re talking about frugal people here,” says Lillis, the community foundation member.”It’s just in our DNA. No one is getting crazy with spending.”

“Dean’s donations have given us resources,” Eichler says.”And it’s laying the foundation for long-term success. It’s been a whirlwind couple of years.”

That community spirit has also created a sense of volunteerism. Community events are on the rise, with last year’s parade being the first since the city’s centennial in 1985.”Dean’s motivation is beyond just the parks, but to improve the quality of life and create a long-lasting pride in the community,” Birck says.

Even with his assistance, Buntrock doesn’t necessarily expect Columbia to boom.”I don’t think they are ever going to be more than a little independent town close to Aberdeen, but more important than the baseball field and park is that we have really brought the town together. It’s in good hands.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2024 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Right at Home in Davis

By Chad Coppess

Owner Cinda Wilson refills coffee cups at the Solace Farm General Store.

Just like the traffic flowing through on Highway 18, or the tumbling waters of the Vermillion River northwest of town, the people of Davis always seem to be moving. The traditional late-winter community play, monthly flea markets and poker runs at the Davis Bar are part of a never-ending list of annual events that keeps the place busy, yet welcoming, for visitors.

Davis is home to Solace Farm General Store and Campground, its name inspired by the peaceful nature of the town where roosters crow on main street. Owner Cinda Wilson named Solace Farm the minute she stepped out of her vehicle in Davis and heard nothing but wind and birds.”It just really fit,” she said of the name for her new home after a career in Homeland Security in Sioux Falls and Reno, Nevada. She now runs the store and campground with her sister Karla Romereim. Wilson is also the Davis postmaster.

Open throughout the warm months and on weekends during winter, the Solace Farm General Store is where Davis’ morning coffee group meets. A recent gathering described themselves as”a little of everything — Norwegians and Republicans.” Discussion ranged from snowstorms and politics to waterskiing road ditches while being towed by a pickup.

“Mom used to make stained glass,” Wilson says.”I had made some jam and Karla made sweet cream butter. So, we did flea markets with Mom for a while.” That eventually led to the store, which features nearly 40 flavors of Wilson’s jams, area-made kuchen, chislic, brats, antiques, gifts and giant cinnamon rolls with the morning coffee.

Josh Wiebesiek and Jennifer Beckman rehearse lines for the town’s annual Davis Winterstock play.

The exploding popularity of camping during the COVID-19 pandemic helped the campground on the west edge of town grow.”It’s so nice to see people that have driven from cities in the east just decompress when they get out of the car,” Wilson says.”It’s fun to share open space with people who don’t have it.” Campers get a jar of homemade jam and a fresh loaf of bread.

Never a large town, Davis had numerous businesses in the early 1900s, but a series of disasters nearly wiped it off the map. A 1912 fire took all the businesses on the south side of Highway 18 and in 1928 a tornado destroyed most of the town. Today’s Davis Bar was a two-story brick bank building, but the tornado removed the top floor. Periodic flooding along the nearby Vermillion River has damaged and destroyed property as recently as 2019.

A community tradition began in 1983 when Davis Winterstock was founded, providing area families with generations of volunteer onstage opportunities and a different play performed each year. Longtime cast member Stacy Andernacht proudly pointed out that the show is a fundraiser.”Nearly every improvement in town is from the play,” she says, including the playground in the city park and new roofs on buildings. Proceeds have also helped cancer patients.

The show originally toured area towns and was once performed at Mount Rushmore. Performances are now held in the Davis American Legion Hall each March. The late winter timeframe came about because that’s when the cast and crew — all farmers — had time. The production still tries to avoid planting and basketball seasons.

Cast members admit that professionalism isn’t the biggest priority.”The audience comes to see us perform, not necessarily to see a great play,” quipped Mindy Fischer.”We are paid in laughter.”

Almost everyone involved in this year’s Davis Winterstock production can name other family members who’ve been in the play multiple times.”It’s a big family affair,” says director/actress Charlene Overgard.

Alice Kvigne’s Davis Bar is the center of many events throughout the year.

Generations of families are a common theme involving most everything in Davis. Fire Chief Troi Andernacht joked about”drawing the short straw” for his second term as fire chief. His two sons and wife are all part of the town’s emergency crews.

Darts, pool leagues, predator hunts, tractor pulls and runs, Tater Days and Thistlefest mean something is almost always going on at Alice Kvigne’s Davis Bar.”Redneck Days may be coming back as well,” she laughed.”That one is for kids and kids-at-heart. We have dumpster diving, a hub cap toss, whatever seems fun.”

Poker runs involving cars, motorcycles, tractors or any other vehicle are always welcome to make the Davis Bar one of their stops.”Anytime someone has a cause we make them feel welcome,” Kvigne says.

Hospitality, whether it’s a stop at the bar or a gift of jam and bread, takes many forms in this tiny town along Highway 18.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Staying Humble in Doland

By Chad Coppess

Doland, in Spink County, is home to 150 hearty souls.

Despite being the boyhood home of a vice president and hometown of twin Olympic wrestlers and twin Air Force generals, Doland stays humble.

In his 1960 biography of U.S. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Michael Amrine described Doland’s main street as”a dog asleep and a few dragonflies that are only pretending to be busy.” A recent Wednesday morning didn’t seem much different when city leaders stood in the middle of Humphrey Drive to have a photo taken. No one worried about traffic interruptions.

Former mayor Craig Schroeder is a founder and 20-year board member of the rural economic development group called Basec. The organization was formed in 1994 with federal funds that most towns used in a one-time application. Doland looked at the bigger picture and utilized the money in a longer-term program.”We were challenged to think outside the box, but when we suggested creating a revolving loan fund to continue long-term, we were told that would have to go all the way to the president for approval,” Schroeder says. Tackling the challenge led a Doland delegation to Washington, D.C., where they enjoyed dinner on the White House lawn, a meeting with Vice President Al Gore and shook hands with President Bill Clinton.

Since then, Basec has provided small business loans, home mortgages and funding for community improvement projects, a testament to the forward-thinking of those town leaders in the 1990s.”Everybody worked hard and believed that we didn’t want the town to die,” Schroeder says.”Why would you not want to make the place you live better?”

Hundreds of home loans have been provided through Basec, a splash pad is on the way, and the city-owned daycare has a staff of seven employees and averages 25 children per day.”I’m extremely fortunate to have the daycare available,” said Basec Executive Assistant Samantha Noethlich.”And it’s really rewarding to see how it helps people in other jobs around town.”

Doland Mayor Stuart Bell, Finance Officer Kam DesLauries, Basec Executive Assistant Samantha Noethlich and former mayor Craig Schroeder are proud of their town and the area’s economic growth.

When the Riley Opera House/Twin Kiss Theatre building that housed the Doland Post Office was determined to contain asbestos, it shut down the post office for a short time. Avoiding what might have been the town’s death knell, the city renovated the former library building to make sure postal service stayed in town.

Other businesses in town include two bars, Mayor Stuart Bell’s auto body shop, Full Circle Ag, a convenience store, an insurance office and Jamie and Glenda McNutt’s Just Beecuz Floral and Trophy of a Lifetime Taxidermy.

Glenda McNutt is a Doland native. Though the couple moved away for several years, they found themselves drawn closer to family.”Our oldest son went to school for acting and was chasing his dream, so Glenda wanted to chase her dream of owning a flower shop,” Jamie says. They also purchased the Bottoms Up bar when it became available.”We work our butts off and still don’t make much money at the end of the month,” he says with a laugh.

About 150 mounted animals come out of the taxidermy shop each year. Deer heads, fish and birds mounted by youngest son Dalton are the typical fare. Jamie has done longhorn cattle mounts and once did an armadillo laying on his back drinking a can of beer.”It keeps me from getting a real job,” he quips.

McNutt sees Doland’s location at the corner of highways 37 and 212 as a factor in the continued prosperity of the tiny town. Mayor Bell and Schroeder agree that having a school and post office have been big advantages.”That and people are really giving,” Schroeder says.”We have small town values and people really care.”

A 1983 centennial celebration brought enough people to town that it sparked an every-five-years festival called”Back to Doland” with a big car show and street dance. The most recent”Back to Doland” happened in 2015, but the 2020 celebration was cancelled due to COVID, so residents are looking forward to 2025.

Former resident Hubert H. Humphrey will be celebrated along with former South Dakota governor and Spink County native Harvey Wollman, who passed away in October of 2022. Doland’s famous twins — Dennis and Duane Koslowski, who wrestled in the 1988 and 1992 Olympics, and Air Force Generals Marvin and Melvin McNickle — will also be honored.

That will be enough to wake Main Street’s dogs and dragonflies.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2023 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Welcome to Agar

By Chad Coppess

Ted Asmussen and Lew Robbenholt enjoy reminisching about Agar and Ted’s great-grandfather W.J. Asmussen.

Agar is small, even by South Dakota standards, but the Sully County town in the middle of wheat country thrives. Insurance adjuster Lew Robbennolt, who works inside a former grocery store on Ash Street/Agar Road — the town’s de facto main street — thinks he knows why.”Number one is the soils are really good for growing,” he says.”Number two is transportation, which was the railroad and is now Highway 83. Number three is stubborn, tenacious people.”

Agar was established in 1910 by Charles H. Agar, who also founded Onida, the Sully County seat 10 miles to the south on Highway 83. Although Agar’s population peaked at around 200 people in the 1920s and 1930s, agricultural roots and a love for sports have kept the town viable.”Basketball wasn’t a sport in Agar, it was a religion,” Robbennolt laughs, even though it’s a legendary softball tournament that still comes up in conversation.

Fernando Valenzuela lent his name to the annual invitational”Fernando” tournament in Agar, unbeknownst to the Los Angeles Dodgers pitching phenom of the early 1980s. The Fernando was Agar’s biggest summer event from 1980 to 2000, according to Jay Mikkelsen. The weekend included a pig roast, car raffle and a”wild and wooly” street dance. As many as 14 teams would play in the tournament with spectators parked around the field.”Lots of windshields got broken,” Mikkelsen admitted. Eventually the players and organizers got older, and the tournament faded into legend.

Visitors to Agar today will find two restaurants in a town that once boasted two implement dealerships, two lumberyards and a motel.

Connie and Jay Mikkelsen serve comfort food at Millie’s Diner on Connie’s grandfather Mike Smith’s homestead.

The Bunkhouse Bar came into being when a cafe that was across the street burned down during harvest season. Farmer Stan Asmussen had a bunkhouse for harvest hands that needed feeding, so he quickly converted it into a cafe and bar, which has survived ever since. Laynee Brandt is the current owner, but she wasn’t even born when the Brandt family bought the Bunkhouse in 1982. Her mother Tamie does most of the cooking. Saturday night Mexican food specials bring customers from as far away as Pierre.

Newer to Agar is Millie’s Diner, opened in 2020 by Connie and Jay Mikkelsen just six weeks before COVID shut them down for a stretch. A rural post office known as Milford, which existed before Agar’s founding, inspired the diner’s name. The dining rooms and backyard are filled with antiques the Mikkelsens pick up wherever they travel. Between browsing the historical items and enjoying comfort foods like chislic, hot beef combos and homemade pies, Jay says people always seem to leave with a smile.

Ted Asmussen’s great-grandfather W.J. was known as”Potato Pete” for his large garden; his name is still painted on the last bank in Agar. W.J. was a farmer, rancher and well-known for finding a place that would grow grass even in the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s. Much of his money was made selling grass seed to the federal government for reseeding decimated areas of the Great Plains when the drought ended.

Yes, Agar may owe its livelihood to good soil and good roads as Robbennolt believes, but Potato Pete’s great-grandson would add one more reason:”Optimistic people.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Tending to White Owl

By Chad Coppess

Ann Shaw and her family have kept the spirit of White Owl alive by repurposing its former stagecoach stop into the White Owl Creek Boutique.

When the closest town with a population over 1,000 is 65 miles away and you have only one business, your community might be considered a ghost town, but White Owl has some very”uptown” amenities. Words like boutique, salon and podcast aren’t unusual here.

Ann Shaw’s White Owl Creek Boutique offers women’s fashions in the White Owl Store, a 120-year-old building that was the first Post Office in Meade County in 1893 and still serves that purpose today. A salon offers all the services you might find in a larger city, including massage therapy.

Ann loves the opportunity to keep White Owl”on the map.” She purchased the White Owl Store in 2020 and opened in 2021 as the boutique/salon.”Nothing is straight. It gives it character,” she grins about the building that once served as a stagecoach stop.”Nobody wants to see a building go downhill and we want to keep our post office alive.”

“Everyone here has the same mindset,” says Ann’s daughter Kylie of the tight-knit community.”We don’t want to fade away.”

Offerings at the boutique are”one and done” runs of clothing, so if you spot something you like, you better grab it, because chances are it’s not coming back. Ann handpicks the jewelry, along with candles, shirts and rubber band guns — all made in South Dakota.

White Owl Creek Boutique offers area ranch families merchandise that might not otherwise be found within an hour’s drive.

White Owl Creek Boutique is usually open Monday through Saturday. The dream is to host family reunions and events with arts vendors and Meade County historians. Shaw calls them”little festivals. We want the scenic route visitors looking to experience something different.”

“White Owl has the potential to grow,” Ann says.”There are people around with talents and trades.” This thinking is behind the podcast run by Shaw’s sister-in-law Jodene Shaw and friend Molly Fulton.”I’ve wanted to do a podcast for a long time,” Fulton says.”It seemed like it’s not that hard.” So she asked Jodene to join in creating Place Well Tended, an ongoing discussion about”creativity, place, landscapes and South Dakotans.”

“Where I live is considered the middle of nowhere and yet there are people doing incredible things,” Jodene says. She should know. Shaw is a visual artist who uses mixed media to create pieces sold in the White Owl Creek Boutique and at art galleries and shows throughout western South Dakota.

Through their podcast, Shaw and Fulton have discovered that South Dakotans often think alike.”There are a lot of commonalities that create a community,” Jodene says.”And we have gotten to talk to the coolest people.” Guests have included Fort Pierre restaurateur Uriah Steber, photographer/videographer Wes Eisenhauer and linguist Dawn Wink.

The first two seasons include 16 episodes, each running around 45 minutes in length and available through several streaming applications. Season Three of Place Well Tended — an apt description for both the podcast and the tiny West River community that nurtures it — is forthcoming.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Lead’s International Flavor

By Paul Higbee

Lead has always been home to many cultures, from the hard rock miners who toiled at the Homestake Gold Mine to today’s scientists making groundbreaking discoveries at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

Spring comes late to Lead due to its mile-high elevation. Then, almost overnight, flowers bloom gloriously in Manuel Brothers Park on Main Street and out-of-town vehicles no longer have snowmobile trailers and ski racks.

Lead is less harried in summer than Deadwood, its”twin city” just a few miles down the hill, but the old mining town still has plenty to offer. There are good restaurants (the Stampmill, Sled Haus, Lewie’s Burgers and Brews, El Jefe’s Fresh-Mex Cantina, and Cheyenne Crossing a few miles out of town in the pines), fine arts at the historic opera house, breweries, museums and the Open Cut, a dramatic remnant of the town’s gold mining era.

Kelly Kirk, director of the architecturally stunning Sanford Homestake Visitor Center that is perched above the Open Cut, interprets”how the past and present collided in Lead” when the storied Homestake Gold Mine segued into the Sanford Underground Research Facility (physics, medical and industrial science) 20 years ago. She sees evolving science and the future of science eventually being examined at the center. Today’s researchers, Kirk says, come to Lead from around the world, but international arrivals are nothing new here; in fact, South Dakota never knew a more cosmopolitan community than Lead. Immigrants flowed into town especially between the 1890s and 1920s, and residents today can still point out old ethnic neighborhoods: Italian, Finnish, Cornish, Irish, Slovak and many others.

Kelly Kirk is director of the Sanford Homestake Visitor Center.

A hundred years ago Gwinn Avenue, running a couple blocks south of Main Street, was known as Slavonian Alley (meaning residents with roots in Austria, Hungary, Slovakia and Yugoslavia) and it was a welcoming place for those from other neighborhoods wanting to experience eastern European traditions. Many of those customs stemmed from Catholic feast days. During the week between Christmas and New Year, homes along Gwinn were open house destinations serving cured ham, fresh breads, apple strudel and wine — always wine.”It was quite a challenge to make a trip through Slavonian Alley,” wrote the neighborhood’s Pearl Krilanovich.”To emerge sober was another thing, as the hospitality of the residents knew no bounds.” Wine was made in eastern European fashion, with great quantities of grapes shipped to town in ice-packed railway cars and then mashed by feet. Not bare feet, Krilanovich stressed; rubber boots were worn.

South Dakota also never knew a more tech-savvy little community than Lead. Homestake Gold Mine, in operation for 125 years and the reason South Dakota ranked first among states in gold production for much of the 20th century, drew most of those immigrants. Sometimes outsiders looked at the mine’s productivity and assumed the founders discovered the richest deposit of precious metal on earth. In fact, ore hoisted from Homestake’s depths wasn’t particularly dense with gold. Rather, Homestake’s international workforce perfected technologies not seen before for extracting quantities of gold, and the company became an American leader in developing hydroelectricity for heavy industrial applications. Lead was rightfully proud of its educated and inventive mining personnel, which numbered nearly 2,000 for decades. They engineered vertical shafts that took miners nearly 2 miles into the earth directly below Lead, and through a network of layered, horizontal passages called drifts that extended 400 miles. What’s more, the workforce applied technology that ventilated the vast subterranean world — in fact, air conditioned it in the deepest regions where temperatures approached 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Twenty years after Homestake’s closure, there are still hard feelings over the way some outsiders discussed a conversion of the mine to a science lab. Lead residents supported the transition — that wasn’t the issue. But they resented the implication that Lead was being introduced to technology for the first time.

Children peer into the Open Cut from the Sanford Homestake Visitor Center.

Some observers also compared Lead to unlucky northeastern Rust Belt towns, and predicted that with high industrial wages gone, some residents might just walk away from homes and mortgages. Abandon Black Hills real estate? In the 21st century? Not likely. It’s true that some unemployed miners left the area, but their homes sold, often to people who always hoped to own a piece of the Black Hills before they died. Today there’s some controversy over owners of classic, older Lead homes who are tempted to break them into apartments for much-needed workforce housing. Should local government enforce single-family home zoning in some neighborhoods? The concept violates the libertarian spirit that seems to reign supreme among liberals and conservatives alike in the Black Hills.

Controversy is nothing new to Lead. Homestake’s public relations department in the 20th century (perhaps the best ongoing PR campaign ever in South Dakota) was masterful in communicating how well various ethnicities got along in Lead. Usually that was true, but it would be a mistake to think of life here as one blissful stroll down Slavonian Alley, to employ a local metaphor. The darkest time was 1909-1910, when the mine caught wind of employees hoping to unionize. Homestake locked its crews out until everyone signed papers stating that they belonged to no union and would never join one. Homestake, actually a San Francisco corporation, won. Some Lead families were hungry before the mine reopened and paychecks came again, and there were resentments between families that ran deep and sometimes along ethnic lines. It was easy to believe certain nationalities were not astute in American contractual dealings. Not until 1966 did Homestake miners unionize, and sometimes family splits surfaced again when the time to renegotiate collective bargaining agreements rolled around.

Still, it was possible to grow up without much awareness of those matters. Lead was a lively town, full of diversions — youth sports leagues, arguably the best recreation building in South Dakota the first half of the 20th century, nearby hunting and the Midwest’s longest and most challenging ski slope just up the road at Terry Peak.

Bob Phillips was not only a member of the Homestake Mining Company Band, he pulled this bass drum through parades while a bandmate played it from behind. It’s among many artifacts at the Black Hills Mining Museum.

Bob Phillips, a retired Lead teacher, coach and school administrator, has witnessed more than half of Lead’s history. He spent his early childhood living in Slavonian Alley and remembers the open houses.”Our family name didn’t end v-i-c-h,” he notes.”But if you lived in the Alley, neighbors made sure you were part of it.” Phillips remembers some of the 16 or 17 grocery stores Lead once supported (many with ethnic specialties), Cornish pasties (a full meal of meat and vegetables baked in a pastry shell), long hours spent in the Homestake Recreation Building and the knowledge he was guaranteed a summer job as a teenager because his dad worked for Homestake. After college Bob and his wife, Cara Pat, traveled to Africa with the Peace Corps and then taught in Minnesota for a year. But then they were drawn back to Lead,”a culture totally distinct from other South Dakota towns,” Phillips says, and they built careers here.

A turning point for Lead came in April 1984 when fire gutted much of the Homestake Recreation Building, built 70 years earlier by the mine as a lifestyle amenity for employees (and, as it turned out, for pretty much everyone else who lived in Lead). The mammoth structure featured a thousand-seat theater, heated swimming pool, bowling alley, library and billiards hall. After the blaze it was determined that insurance alone couldn’t cover a full rebuild and there were people in town ready to write the building off as a lost relic. But others committed themselves to fundraising and rebuilding through a nonprofit corporation. The”rebuild” sentiment became Lead’s majority view and today the nearly lost structure is known as The Historic Homestake Opera House, focusing on a wide range of performing arts. Recent shows, drawing a Black Hills-wide audience, have included touring performers in An Irish Rambling House, stand-up comedian Jason Salmon, as well as a performance series by pianist Kathryn Farruggia. This summer a children’s theater program will put local kids on the big stage. The Opera House is also a popular wedding venue.

Yet 38 years after the fire, the rebuild is not yet complete. The building has a new roof (the original caved in) but marks where flames licked the walls remain visible in the auditorium. For some in the community the scars communicate there’s still work to be done and dollars to be raised.”We have set our sights on the completion of the entire project, raising funds for this massive project,” says opera house Executive Director Thomas Golden. The organization received a National Endowment for the Humanities Challenge Grant and, Golden adds, money”raised as a part of this matching grant will allow us to complete many of the infrastructure related projects such as fire suppression and HVAC.”

Development Director Christine Allen, President Linda Wiley and Executive Director Thomas Golden (left to right) oversee restoration and events at the Homestake Opera House.

Opera House President Linda Wiley says the nonprofit has brought together a community within the community, people”who enjoy the work and also one another.” There can be little doubt, she adds, that the evolving success led to action in preserving other aspects of Lead’s history. Wiley didn’t mention it but people from other Black Hills communities did: long gone is an unfair image that Lead fought for generations about being a company town incapable of tackling initiatives without Homestake’s guidance.

Rapid City actors Kurt and Tina Bauer sometimes lend their talents to the opera house for locally produced shows. Kurt understands what Wiley means about a community within a community.”They treat their actors right,” he says,”and they understand Lead. The opera house is the centerpiece of the community.”

Of Lead overall, Tina adds,”it’s a tight little community,” and one that the couple has explored well, especially after discovering the Town Hall Inn bed-and-breakfast, just steps away from the opera house on Main Street. The Bauers sometimes stay there during runs of their shows. It’s another example of Lead taking care of its past. The little hotel was Lead’s 1912 city hall and jail, with rooms bearing their original names: Mayor’s Office, Judge’s Chamber, and so on.

ìIt was the city hall until the 1930s, when it was replaced by the present one that was built as a WPA project,” says Mark McGrane, the owner along with his wife Jade and his brother Paul. The trio found a perfect use for the old town jail, turning it into a cozy pub called Jailhouse Taps. They brew their own Belgian-style beers.

Blond Alibi and Dungeon Drunkard are locally popular Jailhouse Taps brews. Being a tight-knit community, Lead people are quick to point out another beer producer just up the street — Dakota Shivers Brewing. The affection Lead demonstrates for its beers makes you wonder if they will still be recalled a century from now, much like those legendary Slavonian Alley wines.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Life in the Gap

By Bernie Hunhoff

The namesake gap in the hills can be found by taking Highway 101 (aka the 7-11 Road) northwest of Buffalo Gap about 2 miles. The opening begins where the road intersects Beaver Creek, just west of Highway 79.

KAY STREETER HAS inherited Buffalo Gap history — everything from land, cattle and buildings to scraps of paper. It couldn’t be in better hands.

“I was born on the plains,” she says.”I’m a child of the land and there is something about it that has a deep call for you.”

Streeter grew up in southeast South Dakota and arrived in Buffalo Gap — in the state’s southwest corner — as a young bride, marrying into a family steeped in ranching, banking, public service and saddle-making.

She eventually moved away to teach at Montana State University in Billings but returned to Buffalo Gap in 2010 to care for elderly relatives. She’s happy to be back in the town of 100. Her oldest son oversees the family cattle operation because Streeter is busy with other priorities, including the family residence that was built by homesteaders and eventually rolled into town with horses and logs a century ago. Streeters have owned it since 1947.

She also hopes to repair an old barn moved to town by N.B. Streeter in the early 1900s to house his team of horses when he commuted from the ranch. She and a friend, Kathy Sanford, bought another historic home,”because we were worried what might become of it,” but much to her four adult children’s delight, they found a satisfactory buyer who is doing the restoration.

Darla Sanson Semmler (left) and Kay Streeter (right) welcome a visitor at the Buffalo Gap Post Office.

Now she is delving through her mother-in-law’s papers.”Eva Streeter was the Buffalo Gap postmaster, and she ran a women’s hair shop from the house,” she says.”She kept a journal and wrote down why the ladies were getting their hair done — maybe for a wedding or because someone was visiting. If they got a permanent, she served them lunch.”

Her chief partner in Buffalo Gap history is Darla Sanson Semmler, a longtime friend who ranches near town.”The Streeters and Sansons have lived together up on Red Valley Road, on the south side of the park fence, forever,” Streeter says.”They did everything together. Back in the 1930s when people didn’t have much money the government bought the land for the park, except for the Streeters and Sansons who wouldn’t leave.”

That park is Wind Cave National Park, a wild prairie and forest ecosystem that sits atop one of the world’s longest caves. Nearby is Custer State Park, and east of town is Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, the second largest of 20 national grasslands in the United States, encompassing 600,000 acres in scattered tracts that run from the Badlands near Wall to the southwestern tip of South Dakota.

“When the government started buying out the ranchers for the Wind Cave park, they told the people that they could have anything they could salvage off the land,” Streeter says,”so they took fencing, posts and even entire houses. They thought nothing back then of just putting a house on a set of logs and rolling it, usually with horses, for miles.”

*****

BUFFALO GAP’S STREETS and the rural roads around it are graveled with the sand that rims the Black Hills in a formation nicknamed the Red Racetrack. The gravel is passable on a sunny day, but rain or snow makes it a slippery muck. Still, visitors show up to explore.

“One fellow was out here looking for a town called Mohlerville on his GPS,” says Darla’s husband, Merle Semmler.”I told him, ‘You’re here!'”

Mohlerville was a very rural post office, but it has disappeared into the ocean of grass, interrupted only by the remaining ranch buildings, fences, cattle herds and perhaps an occasional field of grain.

“Hay and grass,” Darla says.”That’s what we do. We are on the Angostura Irrigation District, so we have at least three, maybe four cuttings of hay. One farmer grew sunflowers for a couple of years, and another tried soybeans, but they didn’t do worth a dang. There was more corn a few years back than there is now.”

Any sheep?”Don’t even ask!” laughed Darla.

“If they have sheep, it might be one or two for the kids’ 4-H projects, or maybe a few goats,” added Merle.

We’d already committed the Old West faux pas of inquiring about sheep at Rancher Feed & Seed and got a similar reaction. This is cattle country, populated by cows and calves, and the horses, dogs and people who tend to them. The range war between sheep growers and cattle ranchers is over, and the latter have prevailed around Buffalo Gap.

*****

THE TOWN OF BUFFALO GAP came to life in 1876 when miners and traders flocked to the Black Hills. Streeter says the town took its name,”from a break in the Black Hills that provided a reasonably wide valley exit for Beaver Creek.” Buffalo traversed the gap for centuries as they made their way from the Black Hills to the Plains. Stagecoach drivers followed the buffalo trails when gold was discovered in the Black Hills. So did cattle herds, cowboys and miners.

Marge McColley (left) and Carrie Zoellick are volunteers at the town’s food pantry. McColley, 94, grew up near Buffalo Gap and remembers when the bank was still operating in the 1910 sandstone building that now houses the pantry and serves as city hall.

The original town was built on Beaver Creek, about 3 miles east of the gap. In the 1870s, the town had four blacksmith shops, 23 saloons, 17 hotels and restaurants, two”sporting houses,” four Chinese laundries, a few stores and some tents where church services were conducted. The town boomed to 3,000 when a railroad track was laid from Chadron, Nebraska, and Buffalo Gap enjoyed the status of being at the end of the line.

However, the boom faded when tracks were extended to Rapid City and Belle Fourche. Two major fires also caused setbacks. Most of the surviving architecture, including wood frame buildings and a few of sandstone, were built in the early 20th century.

The town’s red stone bank building, constructed in 1910, now serves as city hall and as a collection point for a food pantry, which is run in part by Marge McColley and Carrie Zoellick.

McColley, 94, now lives at Custer but she grew up near Buffalo Gap and remembers when the bank stored cash rather than cans of vegetables and fruit. Zoellick came just four years ago, then lost her husband and became the town’s handywoman. She drives the city snowplow, reads the water meters, serves as secretary to the rodeo association, mows the grass, paints buildings and tends bar.

Zoellick also volunteered to be our tour guide. She showed us the new rodeo grounds on the east edge of Buffalo Gap; the Baker family donated the land and others volunteered time and materials. She also showed us the present-day Buffalo Gap Cemetery, which is about a mile from an all-but-forgotten”boot hill” where a few horse thieves are buried.

*****

DOWNTOWN BUFFALO GAP is busier than you’d expect of a seemingly forgotten town that lacks even a hard surface road to connect it to the outside world. The old-style farm store with its wooden grain elevator is still operating; so is the quaint and charming post office and two drinking establishments.

The town has a lively social life, with rodeos and horse events at the new rodeo grounds, a summer bluegrass fest and a July event called the Buffalo Gap Blowout. On Thanksgiving Day, ranch families and city residents are welcome at a community potluck in the old auditorium.

Buffalo Gap boasted 23 saloons at its peak population. Today there are two.

Buffalo Gap’s biggest enterprise is TwistedSage, a business dedicated to the healing properties of copper. Brian Besco (above), the founder, and a team of family and friends manufacture and market myriad products and ship them around the world from the town’s tiny post office.

The Last Chance, run by retired postmistress Shirley Carlson in yet another red stone building, was constructed in 1907 as a hotel. Carlson’s business partner, Tom Huninghake, has restored it and several other structures. She opens Last Chance every day of the year, mostly serving the ranchers who surround Buffalo Gap. An elk’s head with massive antlers hangs above the bar, near a cautionary sign — NEXT BEER STOP GOING EAST, 114 MILES; that would be in the town of Interior, on the other side of the national grasslands, the Pine Ridge Reservation and Badlands National Park.

Across the street, Elray Rosaaen operates the Water Hole. Rosaaen came to Buffalo Gap 15 years ago when he found an affordable trailer house. He built a bar, as well as the attached Buffalo Gap Trading Post, a secondhand shop and convenience store with grocery staples.

Rosaaen’s inventory ranges from wildlife mounts to artwork, appliances, hides, fishing rods and hundreds of pairs of cowboy boots.”There’s a lot of dead cowboys around here,” he lamented.

Buffalo Gap’s biggest business is TwistedSage Studios, a company that seeks to improve the health of the cowboys — and people around the globe. Brian Besco, the founder, was raised on a ranch near town. He says his healing products blend science and spirituality. By precisely cutting and shaping copper, his staff creates products designed to heal people by enhancing their positive energies and bringing coherency to chaos.

Besco believes the products are a refinement of the ancient theory that copper can alleviate aches and pains.”This can make all our organs function better, by cleansing the emotional and physical energies,” he says. He now travels the world, sharing the TwistedSage philosophy.

He and his crew — which includes family and longtime friends — produce bracelets, pendants, tensor rings, wands and numerous other products, including a ring that attaches to cell phones. They package and ship the products daily from the small, historic post office a block away. Outside his workplace is the Giant Pyramid, a spindly tower created for last year’s Disclosure Fest in Los Angeles, a mass meditation event that featured yoga, music, arts and healing therapies.

Besco says visitors to Buffalo Gap are welcome to stand or sit under the pyramid and”just be.” He’s also developing an energy spa in an old storefront that was once headquarters for the Streeter family’s saddle shop. It will feature smaller energy chambers for visitors.

“We hardly do anything locally,” he says,”but over the past five years, people are really getting into the world of consciousness so we hope this new studio can be a place where they can come to learn and experience that and to heal. We see a lot of miracles take place every day.”

Gold brought the first boom to Buffalo Gap. Cattle has kept it going. Copper is adding a new twist.

History is still being made in the gap.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Malchow Plaza

By Bernie Hunhoff

Brodie Mueller (center) and Carly Pochop (right) created Market on the Plaza, a coffee shop and gift store with South Dakota arts, crafts and foods. Their establishment opens onto Malchow Plaza, Aberdeen’s new gathering place.

THE THIRD SATURDAY in October of 2019 is unforgettable for many Aberdonians. They recall where they were when they heard the news. They remember smelling smoke before they saw the flames. And they remember worrying about the future of Main Street.

It happened on opening day of pheasant season, a festive occasion in the Aberdeen area where wild ringnecks still flourish in the flatland cornfields and grassy sloughs that surround South Dakota’s third largest city. By 6 p.m., hunters were finished for the day.

“I was at the Circus (a sports bar) when some guy came in and said there’s a building on fire,” remembers Carly Pochop, a local artist who runs a store called Colorful Creations.

Her first thought was,”Oh, no, I hope it’s not mine!”

Pochop rushed out to the street to find that though her shop was safe, smoke was coming from the big Malchow Home Furnishings Store, a cornerstone of the Aberdeen business district for 75 years. She especially worried about the people living in the apartments above the store.

“We’d just finished cleaning our pheasants,” says Mark Malchow, the third-generation furniture store owner who had been hunting with family.”I got a call from a friend who said there was smoke at our building. At first, I wasn’t too alarmed because it’s pretty common for someone to burn a pizza or leave a pan on the stove.”

Then the friend called back to say he saw flames. Still dressed in hunting garb, and with his dog in the truck, Malchow rushed to Fifth and Main. Like Pochop, his first worry was also about the residents in the apartments.

Fortunately, two of the tenants had smelled something burning and heard a smoke detector as they were exiting the building at about 5 p.m. They thought someone had burned their dinner, perhaps, but they hung around and soon saw smoke coming from a door. When no one answered their knocking, they kicked in the door, saw flames and smoke, and called 911. Then they began to alert their neighbors in the building’s 17 apartments.

The city’s firemen, stationed just four blocks away, were on the scene in minutes. They made certain that everyone was evacuated, and they fought to save the building while hundreds of people converged on the streets to watch and commiserate.

A play went on as scheduled at the majestic Capitol Theater, which is just a few doors north and across Main Street. Patrons watched local actors perform Bridge to Terabithia, though they could see whiffs of smoke wafting near the stage lights.

Firefighters kept the flames from spreading to neighboring stores, but they couldn’t save the Malchow building. Main Street was blocked off from car traffic for a few days after the fire, which added to the somber atmosphere. Then winter snow settled over the black ashes, and for months the Malchows and many others in Aberdeen wondered what would become of the empty hole.

“It was just a big punch in the stomach,” remembers Malchow.”Nobody died. Nobody was injured, not the residents or the first responders. So that was the best thing.”

*****

MIKE BOCKORNY WAS one of the Aberdeen residents who waited and wondered. He was also at the fire on Oct. 19, though not in his official capacity as CEO of the Aberdeen Development Corporation. He went to the scene to support Malchow, a close friend.

Malchow Plaza grew from the ashes of a devastating 2019 fire that destroyed one of downtown’s landmark buildings.

“I just wanted to be sure Mark was okay, first of all, and then to make sure anybody who might have been in the store or the apartments were okay,” Bockorny says.

Bockorny’s offices were then in the city’s Industrial Park, but he noticed, like everyone else, that the fire had left a hole in the center of town.”It was the first thing you saw as you turned off Sixth Street onto Main — a giant burned-out building that had collapsed,” he recalls.

At first, civic leaders hoped the Malchows might rebuild. However, Mark Malchow soon developed a plan with the Montgomerys, another longtime South Dakota furniture family, to partner with them on a new store in an empty retail building on the east side of town. The Malchows represent three generations in the furniture trade and the Montgomerys recently celebrated their 130th anniversary and fifth generation, so their collaboration was big news in the South Dakota business community.

It also opened new possibilities for the hole on Main Street, says Bockorny, and the timing coincided with discussions that he had been having with the community’s Chamber of Commerce and the Convention & Visitors Bureau.

The Chamber and CVB were already officed on Main Street, near the hole.”We went out and visited with a lot of our key community partners and we talked about whether it made sense to be located closer to each other,” Bockorny says.”We talked about the importance of downtown and what Main Street means to recruitment and retention of people, and the quality of life. Young people, especially, like to live and work and play in a downtown district.”

In the discussions, Bockorny also proposed a concept that he’d seen in other cities — a plaza that would serve as a gathering place. Then he broached the idea with the Malchow family.

“My wife Gina and I were driving to Sioux Falls for a weekend getaway when Mike called,” remembers Mark Malchow.”By then we’d had some other people approach us about the empty space, but we could see the benefit to the community. I talked to Mom and Dad and the rest of the family, and it wasn’t long before we all shook hands and said yes.”

*****

SPENCER SOMMERS WAS called upon to lead the planning. The Aberdeen native, an architect with CO-OP Architecture, was out of town on the night of the fire but he remembers thinking — as he was texted the awful news — that a lot of the downtown’s residential space was being lost.”What if it would just become another parking lot?” he wondered.

Several small shops and eateries surround Malchow Plaza, including One-Legged Pheasant Brewery, operated by Nikole Sidener and her family.

Quite the opposite has happened. Today, a new, $2.5 million office complex has arisen from the hole. Bockorny’s staff is headquartered there, along with radio studios for Dakota Broadcasting (now nicknamed”The Shark on the Plaza”) and a new coffee shop called The Market on the Plaza that features South Dakota clothing, foods, arts and crafts. Best of all, a beautiful outdoor space known as Malchow Plaza bridges the new construction to the old downtown, including the nearby Capitol Theater and the Masonic Temple, two Aberdeen landmarks.

The plaza is more than just a paved surface with tables and umbrellas. Sommers and his associates at Confluence, a landscape architecture firm in Sioux Falls, designed an island with a raised area in the center that adds privacy, beauty and mystique. The island will eventually be green with bushes, flowers and a shade tree, but Carly Pochop, the downtown artist who partnered with Brodie Mueller to start the adjacent coffee shop, led an effort last summer that filled the area with hundreds of yellow clay roses.

The rose project started after Pochop’s father died. She made a dozen clay roses for his gravesite to deal with her grief. Recognizing that others were dealing with sadnesses of their own — some due to the COVID outbreak — she offered free clay and assistance to all. Since then, 600 yellow roses have been”planted” in the new plaza, some with names, messages and Bible verses.

Sommers, the architect, admits to wondering whether the people of Aberdeen would use the plaza. Pochop’s roses showed that the possibilities are endless. All summer long, families, shoppers, downtown diners, theater goers and tourists gathered there. It also became a popular outdoor venue for concerts, farmers markets, car shows and numerous other events.

Malchow says the plaza is everything his family hoped it would be, although he admits to a tinge of nostalgia when he sits in a particular spot and recognizes that it was a favorite place in the store. Still, he says the transformation is good for Aberdeen.

“I am a downtown person. I always will be and my dad always will be. Downtown was just getting some traction and now the plaza will only help it grow,” he says.”We love to go downtown for dinner and then just sit in the plaza, maybe watching as people enjoy a beer or a glass of wine or ice cream. I just like the unassuming nature of it, and it’s very humbling to have it named for our family.”

Bockorny says the plaza fulfilled his most optimistic vision.”There was a concert recently where you could hardly move, it was packed, and it was just so good to see people having fun and socializing and laughing.” And he believes Malchow Plaza is making a difference beyond Fifth and Main.”The interest in entrepreneurial business ventures is growing,” he says.”Downtown is coming back. It’s noticeably busier and people are looking for opportunities to live and work here.”

There’s another good omen: Shoe Science, which started downtown nearly 40 years ago, moved back to Main after the plaza was finished — to a building that was once the Webb Shoe Store, a downtown fixture for 100 years.

Marbles in a mural on the plaza’s south wall, painted by Aberdeen artists Nick and Nicole Fischer, show reflections of other city treasures.

The Aberdeen Downtown Association now hopes to reopen Main to two-way traffic after decades as a one-way. Sommers, who also serves as that group’s board chair, says the change might double the number of cars that pass by Malchow Plaza and the nearby shops and eateries.

The ADA has also promoted downtown murals, including a fanciful painting of marbles in the plaza by local artists Nick and Nicole Fischer, and supported an effort to restore century-old painted store promotions known as”ghost signs.”

The biggest downtown news came in September when Sommers’ CO-OP Architecture group announced plans to restore the long-vacant Citizen’s Building, a six-story brick mammoth just three blocks north of the plaza.

The Citizen’s Building, constructed as a bank in 1910, is the tallest building on Main Street. In its heyday, the six floors were filled with offices and the rooftop was an outdoor patio with a garden restaurant and tents for shade.

Sommers says the $9 million project will have retail space on the ground floor and up to 40 apartments on the upper levels, some with splendid views of the Brown County Courthouse, the Capitol Theater and prairie vistas, including grain elevators at Mina, west of the city. He and his partners intend to preserve historic elements that have survived, including a glass mail chute, original stairways and railings. They also hope to restore the rooftop patio.

Fire has plagued almost every downtown in South Dakota. But there are huge differences in how cities have responded after their flaming”gut punch,” as Malchow described his town’s 2019 fire. Stroll down Main Street today and you’ll have Aberdeen’s answer.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2021 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Renewed Energy

By John Andrews

Executive Director Jamie Mack and Events Coordinator Kathryn Jurrens help oversee daily activities at Watertown’s Goss Opera House.

TEN YEARS AGO, Watertown’s Goss Opera House was abuzz with activity. Comedy shows and concerts were being staged in its grand, second-floor theater. Diners raved about the steaks at Charley’s Restaurant and the delicious coffee brewed in a little shop called Common Ground. Local artist Josh Spies displayed his oil paintings and exotic wildlife mounts taken during African safaris. Retired high school speech teacher Donus Roberts sold books in a main floor shop and other local artisans offered silk scarves, purses and jewelry in the emporium.

David Berry led downtown Watertown’s renaissance. The South Carolina attorney and then-husband of Watertown lawyer Nancy Turbak had toured the Goss in 2007 and bought it for $150,000. He initially envisioned a renovated theater that could be used as an entertainment venue, but there were challenges in bringing a 19th century building into compliance with 21st century standards. Berry bought the neighboring building to help address accessibility issues and built a commercial kitchen and meeting room. When the Second City Comedy Tour performed in October 2009, it was the first ticketed event held in the Goss in more than 70 years. The applause at the end of the night was as much for Berry’s vision as it was for the show.”At the time, Watertown was an epicenter for arts and culture in the state,” Berry said of the city in 1889, the year Charles Goss finished his grand building at the corner of Kemp and Maple.”That’s really what our vision is here: the renaissance of arts and culture in South Dakota.”

But completely renovating a building as historically significant and as large as the Goss is difficult for any group, and potentially impossible for an individual. After several years the burdens were growing too much, and in 2017 Berry reached out to Brad Johnson, a local businessman and real estate appraiser, for help. Johnson had worked with Berry on the Goss project almost from the beginning and began contacting local businesses and organizations to keep the Goss alive. Johnson and Doug Sharp, owner of Sharp Automotive, took over the restaurant and established a nonprofit organization called Friends of the Goss. As they worked to transfer ownership, structural engineers who had been hired to inspect the 128-year-old building brought bad news. Two major beams in the roof had broken and begun settling into the opera house’s superstructure, causing its walls to crack. The entire building was in danger of collapse.

Johnson, Sharp and the original Friends of the Goss board agreed with Berry on a purchase price of $300,000. The group secured $150,000 from the Watertown Area Community Foundation and approached the City of Watertown for a match. The council voted against it on April 17, 2018. The next day the Goss went dark, its future as murky as the black plastic that now shrouded its windows and doors.

The Goss’ lighter and brighter theater features a state-of-the-art sound system that allows bands to “plug in and play.”

“To him as much as to any other man is due Watertown’s present prosperity and financial strength,” the Watertown Public Opinion said about Charles Goss the year he ran for alderman. Goss was an Englishman, born in Buckinghamshire in 1833. He emigrated with his parents at age 11 and lived in New York and Wisconsin, where he farmed and spent time in various trades, including carpentry, barbering and the restaurant business.

Goss moved to Watertown in 1879, bringing lumber with him from Wisconsin to build a general store. The next year he constructed four additional buildings, one of which housed an opera hall on the second floor. But early one morning in April 1888, passers-by reported fire in the rooms above Goss’ main floor drugstore. By the time firefighters arrived, they could only work to save the adjoining structure. The Goss building was destroyed.

Goss almost immediately decided to rebuild. In June, he began laying the foundation for a building that included 65 feet of frontage on Kemp Avenue and 125 feet on Maple. The Public Opinion reported that it would likely include a public hall for entertainment, but its editor was not impressed.”He will certainly make a mistake in his whole scheme,” the paper said.”Watertown is already well supplied with facilities of this kind. There is a possibility of a hotel proving a paying investment, but another public hall would be a dead load.”

Charles Goss

True, the Grand Opera House stood directly across the street and there was another opera house just a block away, but Goss was insistent. As the bigger and better Goss Opera House slowly took shape, opinions began to change. Plans were mostly finalized by August. The building would include seven storerooms on the first level and an opera house on the second and third. Office spaces would be located along both the Kemp and Maple sides.”When completed it will be one of the handsomest among our many handsome blocks,” the Public Opinion said.

Goss held a grand opening in December 1889 with events prepared by the ladies of the Congregational Church. There was also a Merchant’s Carnival, which featured 60″banner girls,” local ladies dressed to represent Watertown businesses and paraded through the opera house. It proved so successful that it was staged again the following night.

And so the Goss Opera House began a several decade run as a focal point of downtown Watertown. Goss continued to run a drug and crockery store on the first level, as well as manage the rest of the building, until his death in January 1905.”He was of peculiar make up,” read the Public Opinion’s obituary.”He was firm and strong in his convictions, forceful, outspoken, cynical and absolutely independent. He cared but little for the opinion of his fellow man but suited his life to the conditions of the world according to the view which he obtained through his own eyes. There was nothing conventional about ‘Fodder Goss.'”

The years after World War II marked the beginning of a slow and steady decline. The public hall — once the site of plays, dances and other community events — gave way to roller skating and basketball. Eventually it became a favorite spot for youth to sneak into late at night. A drug store continued to operate on the main level, but no one really paid attention to the upper levels, where pigeons had found a cozy home and water slowly leaked through, compromising the building’s structural integrity.

There were those in Watertown who believed the Goss wasn’t worth saving, while others desperately wanted to preserve the old building but didn’t have the means to tackle such an enormous project. Then David Berry arrived in 2007. He shouldered the load for a decade, and by 2018 it was time for the community to take a page out of Charley Goss’ book and breathe new life into its opera house.

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As negotiations continued between David Berry and the Friends of the Goss, the nonprofit organization expanded its reach, bringing in representatives from Lake Area Technical College, the Watertown Area Community Foundation and Watertown Development Company, which contributed $150,000. Milt Carter, a Watertown native and the head of CSS Farms, joined the foundation as its president and began negotiating a new deal with Berry. The Friends also hosted community feedback sessions to learn what people wanted to see in the Goss. Chris Paulson, now the entertainment director at the Goss, launched Light Up the Goss, a fundraising campaign in which bricks were sold for $100. The effort quickly raised $20,000.”That began our community rally around the building,” Brad Johnson says.”People rallied to it, and then significant parts of the community and businesses invested, because they all understood a focal point of history in your downtown is a critical anchor, and they recognized the value of the Goss.” With Carter leading talks and making his own donation, the Friends of the Goss finally took ownership of the building on Dec. 31, 2018.

A fire damaged room on the third floor of the Goss was left untouched, a reminder of tragedy that struck in 1936.

Riding the public’s enthusiasm, the Friends announced a $3 million capital campaign to address the structural issues that engineers continued to discover. Seemingly all segments of the community got involved, contributing anywhere from $10 to $1 million.”It was almost shocking to those of us on the fundraising committee how vibrant the response was,” Johnson says.”We thought $3 million was very ambitious, and then we hit that relatively quickly, so we decided to fix the whole thing and get it done now, so we went for $5 million. Now there’s nothing major left to do.”

The Goss got a new roof, a new heating and cooling system and new windows, in part thanks to more than $250,000 worth of in-kind donations from local construction and manufacturing firms. Its lighter and brighter theater features a new chandelier, lighting and a state-of-the-art sound system that allows national touring artists to”plug in and play,” as Johnson says. Maverick’s Steak and Cocktails offers lunch and dinner on the main floor, and with a second commercial kitchen upstairs can cater special events in the theater or any of the meeting spaces. The Calvin Boardroom is named for local entrepreneur John Calvin, who died in 2019. His wife, Prudy, donated his granite boardroom table and leather chairs. Prairie Lakes Landing, the third floor gathering space, can accommodate 100 to 200 people.

While much of the Goss has a modern feel, some original elements have been preserved. Two murals on either side of the theatre stage date to 1889. Cracks in the paint are an indication of decades of the building settling and shifting, but the dents and divots may be from the days when celebratory gunfire indoors was common. Original wallpaper uncovered during Berry’s restoration is preserved in the balcony and was recreated and stenciled around the theater’s perimeter.

One room on the third floor was left untouched, as much to remember the extent of the building’s deterioration as to commemorate the sad story that unfolded inside. Maud Alexander was a waitress at the Lincoln Hotel and was living in the room in 1936 when her son Orval, in an alcoholic rage, doused her in medicinal alcohol while she slept and set her on fire. Neighbors heard Maud shouting,”I’m burning up! I’m burning up!” They wrapped her in blankets to douse the fire, but she suffered burns over nearly three-quarters of her body and died the next day. Orval was sentenced to 30 years in the penitentiary, although he was released in 1953 and died in Watertown 10 years later. Many believe Maud’s ghost and the spirits of others still roam the building.

Contractors worked swiftly throughout 2019, and the Goss was ready to reopen in early 2020. But in March the coronavirus pandemic brought the world to a standstill. Staff and the opera house’s board of directors navigated the early months of the pandemic and were able to stage a concert in July. A grand re-opening on September 25 marked the Goss’ formal return as a lynchpin in downtown Watertown.

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The resurrection of the Goss sent waves of energy throughout Watertown’s downtown.”Now the building is what it was originally envisioned to be: a community focal point,” Johnson says.”And because we did that, it sent a signal to the larger community that Watertown was serious about its downtown and preserving its history. Watertown’s decision to save the Goss spurred close to $30 million in downtown investment. It’s not just the renovation of the Goss, it’s the renovation of the entire downtown.”

Fargo developer Jesse Craig created a Watertown Downtown Plaza, which includes Parkside Place, a 36-apartment complex that also houses a quick care medical facility, pharmacy and butcher shop, and The Ruins, an apartment complex currently in design that could include 69 units on East Kemp. Between those complexes, the city of Watertown — in conjunction with a $500,000 grant from the Watertown Area Community Foundation — is building a plaza that will feature a playground, splash pad, green space and an amphitheater.

A coffee shop called Gather is part of downtown Watertown’s resurgence. Staff includes (from left) Darci Biswell, Angie Reppe, Amanda Miller and Mallissa Stockwell.

Craig has also built The Lofts, a $5.5 million building that includes 39 apartments and 8,000 feet of commercial space on North Broadway and is at work on a senior living facility on First Avenue Southwest called Generations on 1st, slated to open in March 2022.

Crestone Companies, a Watertown-based building and development firm, broke ground in November on a project that will include parking, commercial space and 62 apartments on the east end of Kemp Avenue. Eric Skott, Crestone’s CEO, says the downtown transformation has the feel of a domino effect.”The Goss had been in the works for 10 years and the Friends of the Goss finally took it over and funded it the way it needed to be funded. That was one big domino. The other was our Watertown Development Company and civic leaders providing TIFs (tax increment financing districts) and making it feasible for developers to come downtown. We were interested in downtown and loved the old buildings before all of that happened, but it really piqued the interest. There’s just a renewed energy downtown, and I think people are wanting to be a part of that energy, whether you really know why or not. I think it’s just starting to build.”

Angie Reppe became part of the downtown energy 10 years ago when she and her husband bought the old brick building that once housed the city’s Woolworth’s department store. Four years ago, they opened a coffee house called Gather in a portion of that building.”We lost our downtown coffee shop a few years ago, and everybody needs a place to hang out,” Reppe says.”It makes me happy to see people relaxing and having a good time.”

Local artist Dustin Sinner sells originals in a boutique connected to the Goss. His Glacial Lakes-themed paintings are especially popular. Havilah Holzwarth, who helps manage the store, also offers her custom-made shirts and greeting cards. Along Maple, Katie Voss operates Timberbloom, a home and lifestyle store that carries only American-made products.”We wanted American-made, because if you’re searching for American-made, you have to be very intentional, checking the back of everything,” Voss says.”We wanted to be a place where people could trust all of the products to be true to that vision.”

Inside the Goss, concerts, theater productions, meetings, receptions and other community events are packing the calendar.”We’ve been busier in the last year than I think anyone thought,” says Jamie Mack, the Goss’ executive director.”The community has wanted to use the building more than anyone anticipated, so we have people going in and out of here all the time. It’s been wonderful.”

Donus Roberts has watched the downtown spring back to life from his own shop, DDR Books, on Maple, just across the street from where he once sold books.”The mall opened here in 1976, and downtown appears to be the healthiest it’s been since that time,” Roberts says.”We have more stores, and they’ve changed what they’re selling. Lots of things are different now. I’ve been coming down here at night and you can’t park anywhere around here. There are cars everywhere. I have to go around the block and park and come in through my back door, and I’m absolutely exhilarated to do that.”

Downtown Watertown is once again abuzz with activity, and it seems people from throughout the Glacial Lakes and beyond are eager to experience it.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.