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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.

*****

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.

*****

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.

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The Nemo Life

By Bernie Hunhoff

The view from atop Nemo Mountain, also called The Big Hill by old-timers, illustrates how the old logging town is buried in the Black Hills National Forest. Photo by Stephen Gassman.

Troy Saye was already growing weary of Las Vegas when he saw the player piano in storage at the Excalibur. He’d spent years on The Strip, building stage sets for big shows like Siegfried & Roy and King Arthur’s Tournament. But the crowds and the traffic were becoming too much for a man who’d grown up on a ranch in rural Montana, the son of a rodeo calf roper.

“Eventually Dad got too old for rodeo so he moved us to Las Vegas when I was 10,” says Saye, adding that it seems like a long time ago.”I was there 42 years one weekend!”

He was stage manager at the Stardust, and then became a fixture at the theater department of the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. He was working as the”head of props” at the Excalibur when he first saw the unusual old piano that had been relegated to storage. He learned that it had once been part of the dÈcor for a German-themed restaurant.

The coin-operated attraction wasn’t just another player piano with a keyboard. It featured an entire orchestra — drums, cymbals, flutes, a horn and tambourine all playing in unison and glowing in colored lights. Saye had an itch to buy it, though he had no idea for what, and the casino management didn’t know if they wanted to sell. Then, suddenly, the unusual piano was listed on an employee auction site. Saye was busy on auction day, but he quickly offered $350 and asked a friend to keep an eye on the bidding. Soon, someone upped it to $500.

“Pay whatever it takes,” Saye told his friend. Then he worried all day about whether his friend was successful, and if so, what the piano was going to cost him — and what he would do with it if he got it.

Troy and Willie Saye, proprietors of the Guest Ranch, are determined to preserve Nemo’s history. “That’s what people seem to like,” Troy says.

Long before the piano auction, Saye and his wife, Willie, had been looking for a simpler place to live. They thought it might be interesting to run a resort, and pondered lake properties in Willie’s home state of Minnesota, though Troy wasn’t sure he wanted to deal with humidity and mosquitoes. They considered resorts in several western states, but nothing felt right until they read about Nemo, a pioneer sawmill town that had been transformed in the 1940s into a guest ranch. Willie had vacationed in the Black Hills as a child, and Troy’s dad had rodeoed there in the 1950s.”My most vivid memory was when I was about 5 years old and eating a banana split by the rodeo grounds in Deadwood,” he says.

Naturally, a man of the theater believes in fate. He and Willie became the proprietors of the Nemo Guest Ranch in 2006, which means they now own some of the oldest and most rustic cabins and lodges in the West. Much of the resort was built by Homestake Mining Company, which operated a sawmill there from 1898 to 1939. Other structures predate the sawmill, including several more than 130 years old.

Today’s Brandin’ Iron restaurant, which Homestake built as its sawmill office, has a tree growing through the roof yet today. The pine is a bearing tree that is marked (note the yellow metal plate) by surveyors to establish boundaries. Because of the recent pine beetle epidemic, many bearing trees have been lost, but the Brandin’ Iron’s tree is healthy and popular with diners. The Brandin’ Iron is decorated with wagon wheel chandeliers, tables and chairs made long ago of local pine, and copies of Charlie Russell art that were painted by Native artist Tommy Brokenrope and framed with decorative rope knots.

Bladen, Rilyn and Jalyn Norton, of McCook Lake, by the bearing tree inside the Brandin’ Iron Restaurant.

Nemo’s first schoolhouse is now a spacious family cabin, and the mercantile dates to 1889.

The Sayes’ move to Nemo has not been a retreat to solitude. The town has just 42 permanent residents, but it swells with hundreds of visitors every day in the summer, and today’s guests have mostly forsaken quiet horseback rides for rumbling ATVs, which they use to roar through Forest Service mountain trails or climb to the top of nearby Nemo Mountain.

The mud-stained ATVs are great fun, though they do look out of place.”Take away the four-wheelers and the modern cars and Nemo would look like when we had it,” says Buck Troxell, whose father Frank bought most of the townsite seven years after it was abandoned by Homestake.”Dad sold 86 horses to make a cash down payment.”

The Troxells brought 26 horses from their ranch on the Pine Ridge Reservation and converted Nemo into a resort for the Black Hills’ fledgling travel industry.”We gave trail rides and we went to work on the old buildings,” Troxell remembers.”When you have a guest ranch you are a plumber, electrician, carpenter, cook and farrier — and it’s kind of hard for a cowboy to do some of that stuff. It didn’t always look so good.”

The challenge is the same for a Las Vegas stage manager. Saye spends his days fixing leaky faucets, torn screens and myriad other minor repairs required of century-old wood buildings and cabins. He also answers questions.”Visitors always ask about the history,” he says, like where did George Custer camp, or where was the actual sawmill.

“History seems to be what draws our guests,” he says.”Willie and I want to put as much history back as we can. A lot of the places that we looked at were trying to imitate history, but this is the real thing.”

Though he’s busy every day, Saye feels blessed.”I got to grow up on a ranch and I got to grow up in the city. I will take the country life anytime,” he says.”I call it the Nemo life.”

Cheryl Eggers, one of the 42 year-round residents, says she and her husband Norman moved from Rapid City for the Nemo life.”We wanted a place where our kids could play outside and explore the hills and play in a creek.”

Buck Troxell with his roping horse, Too Tightly Wound.

Eggers has grown to also love the history.”This is a town of firsts,” she says. The first Forest Service office in the nation was established here by President Grover Cleveland in 1897, followed by the nation’s first timber sale on Feb. 28, 1898.”We had the largest Hearst mercantile in the country and we were the second town to have electric lights in all the homes, thanks to Homestake’s hydroelectric plant.” (Deadwood was first.)

Custer camped at the top of the valley on a spot known as Pleasant Valley. Decades later, the sawmill grew to be the biggest in the Black Hills, and at one time the town’s population reached 500. Nemo was decimated by the 1920 flu epidemic; so many children died that the women insisted that a church be built so there was a place for proper funerals.

The same church still hosts worshippers at 10:45 every Sunday morning, and the same mercantile is still the community store, though it has changed through the years. A mounted golden eagle is perched above the woodstove. The eagle was exhibited at the restaurant for many decades, long before the Endangered Species Act took effect in 1940. Saye moved it to the store when he noticed that smoke and steam from the kitchen were damaging its feathers.

The store, built in 1889, has groceries and snacks but it also serves as the Nemo museum. Conrad Preston’s big collection of Black Hills rocks and minerals is exhibited on a row of shelves. Old photographs hang on the walls, and there’s an unusual stuffed specimen of a coyote pouring a shot of whiskey.”The poor coyote was roadkill, but we found a taxidermist who created this,” says Saye.

Across the room from the eagle and bartending coyote is the player piano, which Saye’s friend bought that day in Las Vegas for $501. All the instruments in the nickelodeon still work; together they fill the store with beautiful music. The coin mechanism malfunctions, but Troy and Willie will start it for free if you ask. That’s the Nemo life.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Serenity in the Pocket

By Steve Kinsella

The Pocket features Missouri River bottomlands and rough breaks rich with native grasses, ideal for grazing cattle.

It was often a spontaneous decision motivated by the appearance of a fall storm front out of the northwest. In many ways we were like the migrating ducks and geese we were pursuing, driven half by the elements and half by instinct.

We would load into my friend Wes’ blue 1959 Chevy surrounded by the warmest clothes we could find at the Salvation Army, including vintage World War II wool storm coats and flight pants. Being 15, Wes had a learner’s permit that allowed him to drive from dawn to dark and no further than 50 miles from our hometown of Mitchell when not accompanied by an adult — limits that we constantly pushed, often leaving just as the sun set.

Our destination was his grandfather’s ranch in a little-known place called The Pocket, a farm and ranch neighborhood which lies just west of the Missouri River’s historic Big Bend. When we arrived in the dark and trudged through the front porch of the ranch house with our shotguns and clothes — past the saddles, spurs, branding irons and wire stretchers — often his grandfather Duffy wasn’t home. But when we woke before first light, he would always be seated at the kitchen table with a cup of hot instant coffee cradled in his hands, his eyes sparkling at the commotion of the gaggle of half-crazed boys around him.

A rodeo rider in the 1940s, Duffy always told us a story or two about life in The Pocket as he made us flapjacks and eggs before we headed out into the cold to wait for the geese and ducks to rise off the river and fly for the wheat and corn fields on the hills above.

Duffy had been known not only for his ability to land on his feet nearly every time he came to the end of his saddle bronc ride, but also for his Roman racing skills; apparently, he and his neighbor Howard Hansen would each stand on two horses and race around the arena.

Wes’ grandmother had been a member of the Crow Creek Tribe and one of the tribe’s first female council members. She had led tribal delegations to Washington, D.C., many years before. His great-great-grandmother, Many Tracks, first arrived in the area in 1863.

They, like other longtime families including the Big Eagles, the Hansens, the Halls, the St. Johns and the Howes, have forged a life tied to The Pocket, a place that still has one foot anchored in the past and another in the present. It is a tight-knit community of tribal members and nonmembers who have lived side by side for generations.

The Pocket is tucked to the west of the Missouri River’s Big Bend. Illustration by Mike Reagan.

Most people drive by The Pocket without knowing it exists. Traveling east from Pierre along Highway 34, it is the expanse of land south of the road where the Missouri River disappears, only to re-emerge at Fort Thompson or De Grey. There is one main road, 316th Avenue, which horseshoes back as 319th Avenue. Within that horseshoe is a scattering of other farm paths known as Cut Across Road, Lonesome Road and Joe Creek Road. Like many interesting landscapes, The Pocket had a big beginning. A sheet of ice, half a mile thick in some places, paved its way through Canada and the northern U.S., stopping its advance roughly where the Missouri River exists today.

Tim Cowman, South Dakota’s state geologist, says that the glacier likely had”fingers” that extended off the main sheet of ice, reaching into what had been the bed of an ancient sea that today is comprised of a thick layer of hard Pierre shale.

“The river wants to run south, but it hits a protrusion of Pierre shale and bounces back northward until it hits another outcrop where it flows south again,” Cowman says. That pinball action created the bend in the river that 18th and early 19th century explorers often called the”Grand Detour.”

The glacier also gave the land within The Pocket its geological characteristics. Along its southern, eastern and western hillsides lie boulders and rocks — some as large as kitchen appliances — that the glacier pushed along its leading edge. Between Highway 34 and those leading edges is a rich layer of sandy and heavy loam, which, along with the Missouri River’s bottomlands, makes The Pocket highly productive agriculturally. In the 1880s, after bison herds had been decimated and Native Americans had been forced onto reservations, it was reportedly where the federal government grazed the cattle it provided to tribes as beef issues.

“It’s as good as any place to farm because the land is so good,” says Dick Hansen, who traces his roots in The Pocket to 1925 when his grandfather arrived at the request of the Crow Creek Tribe and broke 20 quarters of land for them in a year, an amazing feat considering the equipment that was available at the time. Farming there for more than 50 years, Hansen adds that the land has allowed him to plant,”a little bit of everything.”

It is also home to South Dakota’s only commercial mint farm, which was established in the 1980s on the river bottoms. Visitors to The Pocket can readily detect the herb in the air when it is growing or being harvested. The high-quality essential oil the mint farm produces has been sold to companies including Colgate Palmolive for use in toothpaste, and Mars Incorporated, which owns the Wrigley Company, producers of chewing gum. Along with mint, the farm also grows white and yellow popcorn for Jolly Time.

*****

Amidst and adjacent to these highly productive farm and livestock operations lie roughly 40 homes, including 20 that make up Big Bend Community — an enclave of tribal members that was established in the 1970s. The community’s anchors include St. Catherine’s Catholic Church and the adjacent community center, cemetery and pow wow grounds. The center is used for wakes, funerals, community gatherings and bingo.

Sister Charles Palm plays the organ and tends to myriad duties at St. Catherine’s Catholic Church.

St. Catherine’s traces its origins back to the area’s first missionaries. The church was located on Missouri River bottomland nearby but was destroyed in the early 1960s after Big Bend Dam was built, and the tribe, like other tribes in South Dakota, lost thousands of fertile acres to rising waters. The current church building was moved from a location east of Stephan and includes some of the furnishings that were removed from the original church before the waters of Lake Sharpe consumed it. Also lost to the reservoir was Oscar Howe’s birthplace and childhood home where he lived until he went to the Santa Fe Indian School and studied art.

Community members are highly protective of The Pocket. That’s why they and others quickly opposed an idea to place a hazardous waste site there in the 1990s, in spite of the potential jobs it would have brought to a place with high unemployment. Today, a small billboard stands adjacent to the community, asking visitors and residents alike not to litter in order to protect”Grandmother Earth.”

Not surprisingly, The Pocket has always attracted people. Megan Ernst, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ archaeologist for the Oahe Project, says prehistoric peoples lived there as far back as 5,000 B.C. They were followed by Woodland cultures, who cultivated local plants and inhabited small hamlets on the river bottoms, and then by ancestors of the Mandan, who fashioned larger villages where they grew maize, beans and squash and hunted bison.

The Mandan villages were located on higher ground above the river and sometimes included stockades and fortified ditches for protection from invaders. Today these sites are federally protected and lie mostly hidden beneath the blowing native prairie grasses.

Ernst says that access to water and highly productive agricultural lands was as important to the early dwellers as it is to today’s residents.”The Pocket was occupied back then for the same reasons it is occupied now,” she says.

*****

Unlike the time when the people of The Pocket needed to fortify their homes, today there is a sense of neighborliness and hospitality that some longtime residents say has always been there.”Everyone seems to be there for everyone else,” one resident said.”If someone needs help, everyone will come to help them. If there’s a fire, everyone shows up to put it out.”

A campground at West Bend Recreation Area is a playground for travelers as well as people who live in The Pocket, such as Chris LaRoche, Lyndsey Parsons and their son Christopher.

That sense of community extends to strangers as well. Once, in the early 1980s while I was traveling back to Pierre from Sioux Falls, I decided to stop and see my friend Wes, who by then was living on the ranch. He wasn’t home, and as I turned around in his driveway, my car slid into an icy ditch.

With the sun starting to sink, my car low on gas and the closest ranch several miles to the north, I had no choice but to begin to walk northward, into a howling wind on a February day when the air temperature had not risen above zero, and the windchill was somewhere in the area of 40 below. Wearing a suit, topcoat, dress shoes and no hat, I put my head down and did my best to stay focused on my destination in spite of the wind and the cold. Within 30 minutes, a pickup pulled up alongside me and the driver threw open the door and commanded that I get in.

He looked at me with a sense of concern and sympathy as I tried to warm up, my body shaking so severely that it was difficult to speak. When I finally told him what had happened and explained my connection to The Pocket, he took me back to the car and wouldn’t begin to help tow it out of the ditch until he was certain that I had warmed up and would be all right, even though I assured him I was fine. As I drove back up the gravel road to Highway 34, he stayed in my rearview mirror until I reached the highway.

*****

All South Dakotans and expats have a favorite location in their home state. Spend any time on their Facebook pages and you’ll see fond references to places like Spearfish Canyon, the Needles, Lake Oahe, Palisades State Park and others. For me, it will always be The Pocket.

The author, Steve Kinsella, with his dog, Hutch, in The Pocket.

It’s not so much the place itself — although its beauty and history rival any other location in South Dakota — but the sense of place. Any time I turn off Highway 34 and drive down that long gravel road, with each passing mile the world simultaneously becomes quieter and larger. I am overtaken by a feeling of peace and calmness as my field of vision becomes dominated by a sweeping landscape with views of the vast meandering river, its dark backdrop of Pierre shale anchoring it firmly in place.

I am not alone. When you ask people who live in The Pocket what they view as its most prominent feature, they often say it is the feeling of isolation and serenity they experience living there. That feeling led the postal service to name one of the ranch roads”Lonesome Place.”

Wes Parsons, who took over the ranch after his grandfather passed away in the 1980s, making him a fifth-generation landowner in The Pocket, says that sense of serenity evokes a feeling that never goes away, even for longtime residents.

“I’ve been asked why I don’t go on vacation,” he says.”When I stand on the bluffs and look around, I feel like I am on vacation all the time.”

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

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Box Elder: Under the Radar

By Paul Higbee

A view from Radar Hill shows Box Elder’s expansive landscape. Ellsworth Air Force Base’s hangars are visible in the distance.

Box Elder has been called the South Dakota town that Army and Air Force bombers built. Now, as Ellsworth Air Force Base awaits what will likely be its latest bomber mission — the B-21 — a new breed of builders is also contributing to the city’s rapid growth.

Consider Rob Hrabe, co-founder and CEO of VRC Metals Systems, the high-tech company pioneering cold spray, a process that uses nitrogen or helium to accelerate metal particles in repairing everything from jet components to golf clubs. Box Elder, Hrabe finds, is an ideal setting for building a workforce that mixes retired”crusty master sergeants” and”shiny penny” new engineers from nearby South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

And there’s Daene Boomsma. He graduated from high school in Box Elder in 2000, served a military stint, then started Boom Construction of Rapid City in 2004. He’s changing Box Elder’s appearance with both housing and commercial developments.”I’m passionate about Box Elder,” he says.”I care about its growth, and how it grows.”

How Box Elder got to this point is a story unlike any other in South Dakota. The railroad first came through in 1907. It was the spot where passengers sometimes stood, stretched their legs, and collected parcels minutes before detraining at Rapid City, just west.

Then in 1937, Rapid City built a modernized airport at Box Elder, and at the same time U.S. Highway 14, though still a dirt road, was moving cars through town toward Mount Rushmore. But Box Elder’s transformation happened in 1942, during World War II. South Dakota’s congressional delegation, and Rapid City’s business and civic leaders, were successful in winning Rapid City Army Air Base where the airport had taken form five years earlier. The base’s first mission proved vital to the United States’ success in the war: training crews for the mighty, four-engine B-17 bomber, a plane deployed aggressively both in Europe and the Pacific.

Box Elder’s transformation began in 1942, when South Dakota’s Congressional delegation secured the Rapid City Army Air Base, today known as Ellsworth Air Force Base.

For all of Box Elder’s history and easy access — within hours from any point in the world for Ellsworth air crews, and right on Interstate 90 for South Dakota drivers — it’s surprising how many people can’t place the town. In the case of drivers, it’s not like Box Elder passes in the blink of an eye. It stretches from I-90 exits 61 to 67. With a population of about 10,000, the 2020 census will likely reveal it to be the state’s 12th or 13th largest city in population. It’s home to one of the state’s biggest and finest museums, the South Dakota Air and Space Museum.

So why is the town under the radar, so to speak? Many westbound travelers on I-90 think of the community simply as east Rapid City. Locals sometimes refer to the whole area as Ellsworth, or during high school football and basketball seasons as Douglas, the name of Box Elder’s public school district.

The original B-17 veterans are mostly gone now, but for decades they dropped by to recall their World War II training. Other types of Army planes flew in and out of the base then too, and WAC (Women’s Army Corps) units drilled there. But the B-17 dominated, roaring over the Black Hills and across the northern Great Plains.

There was one topic no one wanted to talk about in those years. The rate of training crashes was high everywhere during World War II. Box Elder perpetually braced itself for the worst. When a B-17 went down, usually the entire 10-man crew perished, as was the case close to town over Radar Hill, out in the Badlands, and elsewhere.

The most tragic crash didn’t involve a B-17. It happened eight years after World War II, after establishment of the U.S. Air Force made the Box Elder base part of that military branch. On March 18, 1953, base commander Brigadier General Richard Ellsworth and 22 other airmen died when their B-36 crashed in Newfoundland. Three months later, President Dwight Eisenhower flew to South Dakota to rename the base in Ellsworth’s honor.

The public was invited to honor Ellsworth and to see Eisenhower, and for many Black Hills people the drive was familiar: east of Rapid City on 14 and turn left at Box Elder. The municipal airport had moved a few miles south of Box Elder in 1950, but the Air Force built solid public relations by inviting South Dakotans onto the base regularly. There were flight demonstrations and open houses. The public saw the huge concrete Pride Hangar, the world’s largest monolithic hangar, built to house the B-36. Generally, South Dakotans believed that if the Air Force built something of that magnitude, and with the Cold War looking long-term, their base was a permanent installation.

While the Pride Hangar impressed visitors, many had difficulty thinking of anything that impressed them across the base’s fence in Box Elder. That was often true for newly stationed airmen, too.”I was assigned at Ellsworth from 1964 to’66, but I lived in Rapid City,” says Leo Coughlin.”What I remember about Box Elder were big service stations on both sides of the road as I drove through, and it seemed like they were always busy.”

More than 4,000 airmen and civilian workers are based at Ellsworth Air Force Base, including Musta Sonbol (left) and Cheung Lin.

“In most little South Dakota towns, when you drive into them you find a local cafe and you start to get the feel of the town’s personality,” says Bill Schulz, originally from Kentucky and stationed at Ellsworth a few years after Coughlin.”I think Box Elder was kind of lost that way, sitting between Ellsworth and Rapid City, with no personality of its own.”

As it has grown, Box Elder has seemingly become two cities separated by Interstate 90. North of the highway is the air base, a new city hall building, the high-tech VRC Metals company that stylishly rehabbed an old school building, and many blocks of new homes and apartment buildings. South of the highway, a more eclectic”old town” remains: horses and cattle graze in meadows, and auto repair shops — each with a tiny junkyard of classic cars and jalopies — appear to be the principal economy. Some new residential neighborhoods lie just below Radar Hill, a high spot with satellite antennas operated by the Ellsworth crews. Actually, there’s also a third face to Box Elder. The southwest corner of town is anchored by new hotels and restaurants close to a popular water park called Watiki. Lodgers and diners probably don’t even realize they are in Box Elder, though they contribute significantly to the town’s sales tax revenue and property tax base.

But long ago, the air base became Box Elder’s front porch. It started in the 1960s when Coughlin and Schulz were part of a new Ellsworth mission: Titan and Minuteman nuclear missiles were installed in underground silos across the upper Great Plains, aimed at enemy targets around the globe. Ellsworth personnel were key to the launch process, thankfully never put into action.

“Box Elder then was mostly just trailer houses,” recalls Schulz who, like Coughlin, chose to live in Rapid City.”There was a cop who would pull you over if you drove through too fast. One good thing I remember was a little Asian food market. There were a lot of airmen who had married overseas during the Vietnam years, and their wives got their food there.”

Thirty years after Coughlin and Schulz’s time, Trevor Smith completed an ROTC program at the University of Notre Dame and learned he was to be stationed at Ellsworth.”I remember this panic,” he says.”I didn’t even know where South Dakota was. I drove out there through ranch lands and was thinking, ëThere’s no one living here.'”

Although Smith soon discovered good friends and meaningful volunteer opportunities in the Black Hills, Box Elder didn’t offer any cheer when he first saw it.”Mostly I remember older trailers, and there seemed to be no center to the town,” he recalls. But just as Schulz had noted a specialty business reaching transplanted Asian people, Smith recalled that during the U.S. military’s”don’t ask, don’t tell” period, Box Elder claimed western South Dakota’s only gay bar.

Schulz, who remained in Rapid City after leaving the Air Force and taught for 28 years at Stevens High School, remembers that decades ago he and fellow airmen learned Box Elder was electing a mayor.”And we laughed and asked ourselves, ëWhat did the mayor of Box Elder actually do?'”

Quentin Goley (left) and Connor Carey are just two of the VRC Metals employees to make the jump from South Dakota Mines in Rapid City.

Living as a South Dakotan for many years has mellowed Schulz’s attitude, and today he wishes current mayor Larry Larson all the best as Box Elder likely faces population growth related to the B-21’s arrival — perhaps even soaring enrollment in schools already full. It was the Douglas School District that first brought Larson to town in 1972, and his first view was much different than that of Coughlin, Schulz and Smith.

“I had graduated from St. Cloud State in Minnesota and was looking for a teaching job,” Larson says.”There was a list of openings and one was at Ellsworth Air Force Base, South Dakota. A friend suggested if I taught there, I’d probably get Air Force privileges, like being able to hop aboard flights.”

Not true, Larson quickly learned. But what he saw in Box Elder impressed him: a diverse and well-traveled student body, commitment to cutting-edge education, innovative student scheduling and accountability and a carousel school.

“I really wanted to teach in the carousel school,” Larson recalls. He accepted an elementary school grade position, loved it, and within a few years decided he wanted to run for school board — not possible as a school district employee. So he took a teaching job in Rapid City, served on the Douglas board for 36 years, then resigned from that position to run for mayor six years ago.

Topping Larson’s goals has been hiring qualified municipal employees,”people with degrees in their fields,” he says. Also, Box Elder under Larson’s watch is losing those trailer houses that colored Schulz and Smith’s initial impressions.”If you drive by on the interstate, you’ll look off and still see older mobile homes, but that’s changing,” the mayor says.”Nice housing is developing, 100 homes in 2019, plus apartment buildings.”

“It amazes me, the homes that are coming up out there,” confirms Coughlin, the 1960s airman who chiefly remembered busy service stations.

Everyone in the Black Hills, it seems, can list Air Force personnel who decided to remain in the Black Hills after leaving the service, rather than return to their home states (Coughlin is one). Only rarely, though, did they see Box Elder as an option. That’s bound to change as Boomsma and others continue building. Box Elder claims an asset that’s rapidly shrinking in some other Black Hills towns: plenty of acreage left to develop.

It’s not true, Boomsma says, that housing is happening only in anticipation of the B-21.”Our market is good, period,” he notes.”Box Elder is a hot area as a bedroom community. It will be fine even if the B-21 doesn’t come.”

Nor is it true that VRC Metals Systems is in Box Elder only because of the B-21, says company CEO Hrabe, a former B-1B pilot who chose to remain in the Black Hills instead of returning to Kansas. VRC, after all, is a home-grown company, coming out of the School of Mines and Technology business incubator. It demonstrates national and international reach with branch centers across the country, and experiments with products having nothing to do with aviation. For example, in the era of COVID-19, it is winning attention with experiments with metals that could offer self-perpetuating sanitizers.

Tracey Scott (pictured) and her husband, Bob, serve many Ellsworth airmen at Gizzi’s, their coffee shop.

What about Trevor Smith’s observation that Box Elder, when he first experienced it in 2004, had no center?

“We hear that a lot,” says Mayor Larson.”We’re working with an urban design architect and calling for community involvement to fix that.”

Plans are in the works for a new commercial district with a road properly named Main Street. South Dakota main streets typically become gathering places for festivals, music and even outdoor movie screenings. Box Elder started the tradition this summer, with food trucks and live music on Tuesday nights and movies on Fridays thanks to a big screen that the Elks Theater of Rapid City brought to town.

Though Box Elder has never promoted itself as a tourist town, the remarkable South Dakota Air and Space Museum claims a loyal following that extends far beyond the state. The museum interprets the full story of the Air Force, and stories of South Dakotans — military or civilian — who contributed to aviation. Museum galleries were closed due to the pandemic early this summer, but nonetheless cars from Alabama, Arizona, Illinois, Nevada and Minnesota were parked at the big museum, which looks like an airfield of vintage planes that tell the stories of World War II, the Berlin Airlift, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East wars. Some are actual planes connected to major historical figures, including the B-25 that Eisenhower converted for his personal transport in 1944 and 1945 and the F-102 that early astronaut Gus Grissom used to keep his piloting skills sharp.

Not much is missing, although there’s no example of the B-17 — the plane that started everything at Ellsworth. Anyone who has a B-17 they’d be willing to part with will receive a warm welcome in Box Elder. Don’t worry about a few dings on the old plane. Those can be cold-sprayed away just up the street.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Lemmon: The Cowboy Capital

By Bernie Hunhoff

Lemmon embraces art, especially the sculptures of native son John Lopez, who created this statue of town founder Ed Lemmon.

If South Dakota built a tribute to the American cowboy, it might look like Lemmon. The little city that straddles the border of the two Dakotas has just 1,200 citizens, but it seems 10 times that size on days when there’s a rodeo or cattle auction. In fact, even on a slow day, Lemmon looks like our cowboy capital, though nobody there would use that term to describe their town because most cowboys won’t brag.

We tried to get Paul Huffman to speak philosophically on Lemmon’s prominence in the beef world, but the 77-year-old cowboy politely and plainly responded,”It’s big cattle country. It’s as simple as that.”

Huffman runs Lemmon Livestock, an auction barn that holds sales every Wednesday, and also on Thursdays during the fall and winter”cattle run,” when ranchers bring bawling spring calves to market. A big sale attracts hundreds of buyers and sellers and up to 6,000 head of cattle. Ranchers sip coffee and enjoy hot beef sandwiches — with homemade gravy and real mashed potatoes — in a restaurant at the auction barn before gathering on bleachers for the auction. Millions of pounds of beef change hands at a busy winter sale, and enough money to make a Chicago banker blush, though in Lemmon a stranger from the city would be hard-pressed to know the buyers from the sellers. Seven-figure transactions transpire in minutes, with nothing more noticeable than a nod or the raise of a finger.

Cattle outnumber people 4 to 1 in South Dakota, making beef the biggest single sector of the state’s economy. However, in Perkins County, where Lemmon is the largest city, there are 37 cattle for every man, woman and child. Seventy-eight percent of the land is grass. The federal farm census indicates that cow and calf sales total about $70 million a year in the county of just 2,400 residents.

“We especially have a lot of natural grasslands to the south and west,” says Huffman. Most of the ranch land is privately owned, but the region also includes the Grand River National Grasslands, a 154,000-acre native prairie. A hundred ranchers have allotments that permit them to graze from 50 to 300 head of cattle — some in community pastures that operate like the open range that existed until 1902.

Stuart and Lisa Schmidt say fossils and ancient geology are popular at the Grand River Museum.

Lemmon was founded in 1907 by a cowboy who was instrumental in the transition from the open range to today’s fenced prairie. Ed”Boss Cowman” Lemmon started as a ranch hand in Wyoming at age 13. Soon he was a trail boss, herding longhorns from Texas to fatten on the rich grasses of the Northern Plains. He was a founder of the South Dakota Stockgrowers Association in 1902 and a leader of the beef industry when he discovered that a rail line was about to be built that would straddle the state border. He quickly bought land for a townsite, hoping he could make his new town the county seat for both Perkins County in South Dakota and Adams County in North Dakota.

Though he didn’t win either courthouse, Lemmon did get his town. Railroad officials named it after the cowboy, and he lived there until the day he died in 1945. Old-timers remember him today. Stories about his exploits are legendary, and several books about his life are for sale at the Grand River Museum, where an exhibit chronicles the life of a man the townspeople called Dad Lemmon.

The museum is a good reflection of how the cattle industry shapes Lemmon. The Schmidt family homesteaded in the Grand River Valley in 1910, contemporaries of Dad Lemmon.”Our grandchildren are sixth generation on the ranch,” says Stuart Schmidt.”My folks started the museum after many years of finding dinosaur fossils.”

Thinking the fossils and other local artifacts might be a way for the town to draw tourists, Stuart’s parents Ed and Phyllis Schmidt began to collect historical and geological items.”We moved into a downtown location in 1998 but we knew we needed more room and we wanted a highway location,” says Phyllis.”We soon bought an old machine shop that was empty for a long time. It was a mess. People thought we were crazy,” she laughed.

If so, their friends and neighbors like crazy: the Schmidts’ efforts attracted many supporters, including the Wheelers and Beelers — two other pioneer families who are very philanthropic in Perkins County, though that’s not a word that cowboys would use. Four years ago, the nonprofit museum moved into a new addition with ample space for exhibits, fossils and cast specimens from the dinosaur age.

Native American culture and history is also documented, and Stuart notes that new information continues to show up, including a hand-drawn map of how to fence the reservation that was sketched by Dad Lemmon. The map was discovered at the Wisconsin State Historical Society when Nathan Sanderson was researching and writing Controlled Recklessness, the latest book about the pioneer cattleman.

The museum has exhibits on major Hunkpapa leaders, including Sitting Bull, Rain in the Face, Gall and Thunder Hawk. It also has a timeline for Creation Science. The entryway features a life-size sculpture of a grizzly bear attacking mountain man Hugh Glass, an epic survival story of the American West that took place in 1823 in the Grand River Valley south of town. After the story was retold in the blockbuster movie The Revenant, Lemmon promoters started a Hugh Glass Rendezvous that has gained popularity every year.

The town’s signature attraction, since the 1930s, is the Petrified Wood Park, a funky collection of petrified wood, fossils, stones and other geological wonders, some mortared together in the shape of trees and spires. Rounded stones known as cannonballs, collected largely from the nearby Cannonball River Valley, are a big part of the park.

The Grand River Museum features a display paying tribute to Ed Lemmon, aka “Boss Cowman.”

But not even petrified art can upstage cowboys and cattle as Lemmon’s top attraction.”Let’s face it, this town has been a cattle town since the start,” says Dave Johnson, the economic development director.”Ranching is our foundation. Everybody feels it when cattle prices go up or down, whether or not they own cattle themselves.”

Johnson says the cow culture goes beyond dollars and cents; it impacts the arts, literature, recreation and education. The local high school mascots are Cowboys and Cowgirls. Rodeo is bigger than football and some local athletes have done well on the rodeo circuit, including Stuart and Lisa Schmidt’s son, Chuck, who is a champion saddle bronc rider.

Lisa’s brother, John Lopez, is a nationally acclaimed metal sculptor. Several of his sculptures are found in town, including the museum’s Hugh Glass piece; a cowboy aboard a bucking horse, by the front door of the high school; and a representation of Dad Lemmon on a horse that stands in a little plaza downtown. Lopez has opened a studio and gallery known as the Kokomo Inn next to the plaza, one of several recent civic additions and improvements — many of them either assisted or spearheaded by Dave Johnson’s organization, the Lemmon Area Charitable and Economic Development.

Johnson worked as a commercial photographer in Dallas and Chicago before coming home. One of his first challenges was the Palace Theater, a dilapidated movie house where he ran the reels as a teenager. The community supported his efforts to digitize the projector system, renovate the interior and reopen the theater for movies, live concerts and other events.

When the State Extension Department held its annual Energize Conference in Lemmon last summer, Johnson gathered some of the town’s newest business men and women in the theater for a panel discussion. He began by explaining that even he is sometimes amazed at how much a little city can accomplish. He credited a creative culture and a community spirit.”The trend for a lot of these little places in the 1980s and 1990s was just to become a bedroom town to a bigger city but Lemmon never had that option because we are too far away from a bigger town,” he said. The only alternative was to maintain a high quality of life despite the smaller population. Encouraging museums, art, restaurants, theater, entrepreneurship and music seemed daunting, but it’s probably not any more difficult than fencing the prairie or building a petrified park.

Jack and Kim Anderson operate Midwest Rodeo Entries, which handles reservations for the South Dakota Rodeo Association, as well as The Current Connection, a computer and office supply store.

Johnson told the Energize attendees, who came from equally small communities across South Dakota, that he learned an important lesson from participating in big projects:”It’s about doing what’s right — it’s never about the money.”

Lemmon’s success stories include a new housing neighborhood and the downtown plaza known as Boss Cowman Square. The community has also supported several new businesses, including a hotel, grocery store, butcher shop, photography studio and a boutique with sequin-lined denim jackets for cowgirls. They coexist with old Lemmon standbys like Wheeler Manufacturing, a family enterprise that employs more than 100 jewelry-makers.

Romancin’ the Range, the new boutique, shares space with a flower store and coffee shop. The owner is Kate Westphal, a young nurse who grew up on a nearby ranch and moved away to Bismarck, North Dakota.”I thought I was never coming back,” she says,”but I started to miss home. Nobody greeted me or asked how Dad’s sheep were doing or how my mom was feeling. Now, if my car breaks down I have 10 people to call, where in the city I had no one. I also realized there were opportunities for growth.” She works as an R.N. at the local nursing home, manages the boutique and makes leather jewelry.

The Current Connection is another Lemmon success. Jack and Kim Anderson started the computer and office supply store 15 years ago. When the local Ben Franklin store closed, they added school supplies. Jack, who grew up locally and rode bulls in high school and college, recognized that the rodeo industry wasn’t taking advantage of technology. He developed software and started a company called Midwest Rodeo Entries, which handles reservations for the South Dakota Rodeo Association, the Colorado Rodeo Association and the Indian National Finals Rodeo.

“Jack wanted to stay active in the rodeo industry, but not ride bulls,” Kim says.”This was a way for him to do that.” He also created summer jobs for teachers and students, who staff the phones.”It saves cowboys and cowgirls a lot of time,” says Kim,”and it gets them to the right place at the right time.”

The town’s new LemmonMade Butcher Shop was started by Carl and Kylee Kimmerle, who came from Utah two years ago to live on land homesteaded by Kylee’s great-grandfather. The shop quickly gained a reputation for beef jerky, breakfast sausage and other specialties. The Kimmerles hope to eventually raise and process their own cattle and hogs, but for now the new business and three young children occupy most of their time.

The downtown area has also been bolstered by the Beeler Center.”It was put up about a dozen years ago because of the success of the Boss Cowman Rodeo,” Johnson says.”Every year, we would rent a tent for the rodeo and someone had the good idea that it might make sense to just build a building.” Ever since, the town has hosted more weddings than 1,200 people would ever propose.”Lots of times, the bride and groom are not from here but they know they can stay in the hotel and there are plenty of restaurants so it’s just a good place to get married.”

The town’s six restaurants include Benny’s, just across the street from the Beeler Center. Matt Johnson (David’s nephew), who recently purchased the long-established eatery, says it’s a challenge to run a steakhouse when most of your customers are ranchers who raise some of the world’s best beef.

“You gotta start with the good stuff,” he laughs. His most popular menu item is called the Steak Sandwich, but again that’s cowboy modesty: the”sandwich” is a delicious sirloin coulotte.

Chislic is also popular at Benny’s, but Johnson doesn’t use lamb, like restaurants in Hutchinson County, where Germans-from-Russia first brought chislic to the Dakotas. He grills cubes of –you guessed it — beef sirloin ball tip.

That seems appropriate, however, in a city corralled by cowboys.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Beauty That is Hermosa

By Paul Higbee

Barrel racer Autumn Garcia exercises her horse, Bee, at the arena in Hermosa.

Hermosa is Spanish for beauty, a fancy name for a working man’s town of 400 people on the eastern slope of the Black Hills where the most noticeable architectural feature is the county fairgrounds.

The town was named by railroaders who loved the mountain views to the west, as well as grassland vistas to the south, east and north. Those natural charms haven’t faded in the 134 years since the naming, and the town has developed a richness of character that now befits its name.

The natural setting has been barely compromised by commercialization and urbanization. Strip malls, office suites, corporate fast-food stops and the busy streets that connect them are 15 miles north in Rapid City, where Hermosans go to shop and where most teenagers attend high school. Hermosa’s modest business district — most of it stretching along U.S. Highway 79 — only adds to the town’s personality.

One of the Black Hills’ best-loved pizzerias is Lintz Brothers, started by Brian and Kristy Lintz in the Mount Rushmore Telephone Company building. They perfected a special crust recipe that came from Charlie Decker, an old family friend.

When the business was just beginning, a telephone work crew came to eat.”We’re hungry,” said the crew leader.”Fix us anything!”

An ornamental garden at the Hermosa Arts and History Association honors Doug Hesnard, a community booster who died in 2012.

Taking that as a challenge, Lintz concocted a hearty pizza with Canadian bacon, sausage, pineapple, sauerkraut and jalapenos. He called it the Flaming German Samoan, and it quickly became a customer favorite. Other standards are the Oriental Texas Tornado and the Big Fat Greek Pizza.”We like to show people that there’s more to pizza than just pepperoni,” he says.

The pizzeria and phone company shop burned in 2015, but a new building was soon constructed for both at the juncture of Highways 79 and 36.”Today we pull 65 percent of our business out of Rapid City,” says Lintz.”It’s a nice drive on a four-lane highway and we’ve become a destination restaurant.”

Despite its close proximity to the Black Hills and Rapid City, Hermosa is not a touristy town. Still, it’s a place where you can visit any summer evening for a pizza dinner and a show because just a mile from Lintz’s is Roy’s Drive-in, which features the world’s largest movie screen. Two of them, actually.

Roy Reitenbaugh of Hot Springs started the theater in 2012, just as the movie industry was going digital. The 15-acre project became an $800,000 investment. Today, he and his daughter Correna show movies seven nights a week throughout the summer. Three hundred cars can park in front of each 80-foot digital screen.

“There used to be three outdoor theaters in Rapid City,” Reitenbaugh says.”Now there are none. We were going to put ours there but they didn’t want us. Hermosa welcomed us with open arms.”

Reitenbaugh says movie-watchers like his small-town setting.”It’s really strange, but we get people from all over. Last summer, in five days I met people from France, Finland, England, Australia and Canada.”

Hermosa has always attracted interesting and entertaining people. The musical Bower family came in the 1880s, settling near Battle Creek. Their pioneer story was told in a 1968 Disney movie titled The One and Only, Genuine, Original Family Band. Gutzon Borglum and his wife Mary moved onto a Hermosa area ranch while Gutzon blasted Mount Rushmore National Memorial from central Black Hills granite in the 1920s and’30s.

The town still gets notable guests and residents. Successful rodeo cowboys like steer wrestler Todd Suhn, roper Jess Tierney and pick-up man Tyler Robertson have Hermosa addresses. Robertson, who was nominated as one of the PRCA’s top pick-up men in 2019, was among a group of ranchers who gave beef to the Hermosa school this year to promote the concept of local foods.

Linda Hasselstrom, one of the West’s best-known rancher/writers, lives on the family ranch south of town, where she hosts writing retreats. Hermosa is also home to Rick Mills, a historian, author and director of the South Dakota State Railroad Museum in nearby Hill City.

The Hermosa Arts and History Association’s brand exhibit features the heart-reverse-heart marking belonging to Linda Hasselstrom and her family.

Mills says that in addition to naming Hermosa, the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad made a decision that saved the town decades later. As the company built its rails north from Nebraska in 1885 and 1886, it decided its line would benefit by a bit more elevation over the spot where a stagecoach station sat near Battle Creek. Hermosa was platted a mile from the stagecoach stop.”That saved us twice during floods of 1972 and 2007,” Mills says.”There was never a grain elevator here, but the railroad moved a lot of beef cattle to market.”

It also moved ore — not the Black Hills’ famous gold ore, but tin from Hermosa area mines. The same year that locomotives first steamed into Hermosa, a school welcomed its first children. Today the town’s K-8 elementary school provides a small-town style of education that appeals to many parents.

Mills credits his Hermosa schooling for stoking his interest in Black Hills history. For example, in the 1970s, he and classmates rode bicycles 4 miles into the countryside to visit the Council Oak, a tree (still very much alive) that marks the site of a peace council between the Lakota people and the Utes.

A former elementary school house is still helping kids — and adults — understand local history, even though the structure was condemned 94 years ago. The big, two-story building replaced an 1886 school in 1889, served students for 27 years, then began frightening teachers and parents because of a structural problem. The building and its bell tower sometimes swayed so that the bell rang spontaneously, according to a presentation by Linda Hasselstrom in 2019, based on research by Geraldine Hesnard Evans. That prompted condemnation in 1926, but the local Masons bought the building, moved it and secured it structurally. As Hermosa’s Masonic Lodge, the transformed school hosted Masons and Eastern Star meetings, community dances and other functions. When the Masons moved into a modern hall immediately next door in 2000, the Hermosa Arts and History Association stepped in to once again transform the old school building and rebrand it as a museum, arts venue and community events center.

The history and arts group’s acronym, HAHA, hints that much of what it does is just for fun, and that there’s room for occasional levity in history. Development of the museum is ongoing but there are already items in place, including”brand boards” with brands from area ranches burned into them, and artifacts representing the Bower Family Band.

Rick Mills, South Dakota’s premier railroad historian, credits his passion for all things trains to his Hermosa upbringing.

Open range cowboys who trailed cattle to the Hermosa railhead in the 1890s were key players in building the American beef industry. In 1919, with the opening of Custer State Park (a 72,000-acre wilderness that surpasses many national parks in natural splendor and outdoor recreation) Hermosa became something of an eastern gateway to the Black Hills. In fact, in 1927, when President Calvin Coolidge and First Lady Grace Coolidge made the park their summer retreat for three months, they traveled into Hermosa on Sunday mornings to attend church. That same building, today the United Church of Christ, stands just a block from the HAHA building.

Hermosa played a role in Cold War history in the early 1960s, with the installation of a Titan missile silo 5 miles south of town. Ellsworth Air Force Base crews staffed it. Today, the missiles and soldiers are gone but it’s easy to find the site because Missile Road is more nicely paved than most country roads in Custer County.

Nineteenth-century weaponry can be found at Highland Park Cemetery on the west edge of town. Two cannons that stood on the Dry Tortugas — an archipelago of small islands several sea miles west of Key West, Florida — now point toward Hermosa. The Dry Tortugas were ideal for housing dangerous criminals, including Dr. Samuel Mudd, who was accused of aiding President Abraham Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Booth. Apparently, the cannons were positioned within view of Mudd’s cell. In 1901 the federal government gifted the cannons to Hermosa’s William Stanley, a Union Civil War veteran. Stanley was highly regarded for organizing posts of the Grand Army of the Republic, a fraternity of former Civil War soldiers, across South Dakota.

Highland Park Cemetery is aptly named; the gravestones sit on a rise that offers a wide vista of the Black Hills’ front range. It is the final resting place for 23 Civil War veterans, Union and Confederate alike. That surprises people because the war was fought a decade before white settlement in the Black Hills. The veterans’ graves are testimony to how many ex-soldiers were motivated to escape the blood-stained East and South for the cattle trails, gold fields and homesteads of the West.

There’s a quieter form of history, significant in its own right, that Linda Hasselstrom wants to see archived at the HAHA museum. In town, and on far-flung ranches and farms, many people kept journals that documented daily life — weather, wildfires, agricultural yields, and family joys and heartaches.”We’re finding people we had no idea might be journaling were doing so for years,” she says.”Many were women, and it’s good to gain those points of view.”

A historic tree called the Council Oak grows in a ditch along Highway 40 west of Hermosa. The tree, estimated to be 400 years old, was a gathering place for Native American tribes.

Mills believes a pride in local heritage has served Hermosa well. He points to the town’s 1986 centennial celebration that brought about HAHA, and says the event spurred regional attention about what makes Hermosa unique. It’s probably no coincidence that the centennial marked the approximate beginning of young families moving in — enough to trigger a school enrollment boom. Lintz, the pizzeria owner, says it’s possible that continued population growth could even lead to a new high school.

His family has ranched and run businesses in the area for 120 years.”There’s a strong sense of community here, and the people that move in here seem to appreciate that,” he says.”It’s nice to see the growth, and yet we’ve maintained the feeling of a small town.”

Hermosa is not for everyone; it’s a town for those who love the idea of seeing their kids immersed in nature regularly, signed up for 4-H and learning to ride and rope at the big arena just east of the railroad tracks on the Custer County Fairgrounds. Hermosa seems to suit South Dakotans who want to be close to urban amenities, and perhaps even the business and career opportunities, of Rapid City but who also like to escape the claustrophobia of highways, high-rises and even high mountains.

Gates swing two ways. Hermosa is not only a gateway to the Black Hills, but also to South Dakota’s wide-open spaces.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2020 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Town Every 10 Miles

By Bernie Hunhoff

Trains still stop in McLaughlin, the largest town in Corson County, because the South Dakota Wheat Growers’ grain elevator ships wheat, corn and soybeans by rail.

McLaughlin’s cafe has a tribute to a local trucker who raised an amazing racehorse. The local sheriff, who lives at McIntosh, is famous for feeding 6,000 starving buffalo. The Merkels operate a new hotel in Watauga, pop. 29, just east of a tiny restaurant with brands burned on the walls.

South Dakota might have too many small towns, but which one would you close? Each has its own character and characters, and the 90-mile stretch of Highway 12 through Corson County — where there is or was a town every 8 or 10 miles — is classic.

“If it wouldn’t have been for the railroad, there wouldn’t be any towns,” says Ed Schock, a county commissioner who lives in McLaughlin, where he often helps his wife Sharon at the city library.”The steam engines needed to be filled with water every 10 miles or so, so that’s why we have so many little towns.”

Today, a dozen trains a day still string their way across a route that was created in 1909 and 1910, hugging the North Dakota/South Dakota border on the western half of Corson County. The steel rails parallel Highway 12 and pass through old towns planned by the railroaders.

McIntosh, the county seat, is named for two brothers who helped build the tracks. But most of the town names have roots in the region’s Native American heritage; in the Lakota language, Mahto (today a ghost town) means bear and Watauga means foaming water. Two-thirds of the county’s 4,100 residents are members of the Standing Rock Reservation, where many families trace their lineage to the great Sitting Bull who was killed there in 1890.

The towns of Walker and Morristown were named for cattle kings. McLaughlin got its name from a powerful Indian agent who was instrumental in developing the region. Geography was behind the naming of Keldron (someone’s spelling of cauldron) because a circle of hills and rounded buttes resembling a massive kettle surround the little village.

Corson County’s spacious grass prairies are beautifully punctuated by gentle buttes and hills shaped by glaciers a mere 20,000 or so years ago. They include Twin Buttes, Clay Butte, Hump Butte and Mud Butte. Black Horse Butte near the Grand River derives its name from a wild black stallion that led a band of mares before settlers arrived. Skull Butte, south of Morristown near the Moreau River, was the site of a bloody battle between the Sioux and the Crow; according to legend, 10 skulls rested on the white sandstone for years after the fight.

“Driving over this rolling countryside has reminded many travelers of floating over an ocean of grass,” wrote Hermosa author Linda Hasselstrom in her travel book, Roadside History of South Dakota. “The region’s buttes stand like lighthouses. Occasionally the highway drops abruptly into a valley with a stream, green grass and scampering wildlife … towns and homes seem unimportant in this place of sky touching earth.”

Yet there are towns and homes and people well spaced in a county that, geographically, is South Dakota’s fifth largest. The people are as varied and interesting as the buttes and river valleys.

Terri Baumeister (right) and her daughter, Megan, live in McIntosh, where citizens often enjoy Sunday morning brunches in the new City Hall. Baumeister, like many rural people, wears several hats: she is a deputy sheriff and the city finance officer.

Keith Gall, sheriff for 25 years, has the easy-natured disposition of a Chamber of Commerce executive despite a host of challenges over the past few years. He and three deputies patrol the 2,500-square-mile county. They write three warning tickets for every actual traffic ticket (statistics like that are kept in a book in the courthouse hallway). They deal with everything from deer-car collisions to pet problems and a meth crisis.”Our problems were 95 percent alcohol related up to a few years ago and now it’s 90 percent drug related,” he says.

A few years ago, Sheriff Gall garnered national headlines when he and his deputies led an effort to feed 6,000 starving buffalo on the big Wilder ranch near McLaughlin.”We spent $60,000 on hay just the first week,” he recalls. He took charge of the animals for nearly three months, and saved most of them.

Another year someone abandoned 14 Chihuahuas. The lawmen spent days trying to trap the little dogs so Pets & Stuff in nearby Mobridge could find homes for them.”I’ve been bitten several times,” said Sheriff Gall, still smiling.

His good nature was sorely tested in 2006 when a young Texan named Dwight Crigger came to town with a grain combining crew and stayed to work as the Corson County Weed and Pest Supervisor. Crigger and the sheriff became friends when the Texan joined the volunteer fire department and ambulance service and became active in the community of McIntosh.

The sheriff found it odd when a county shop building burned down in late 2005, and he was greatly distressed when the county’s historic wood-frame courthouse went up in flames in April 2006. Suspicions arose when Crigger’s whereabouts became an issue, and after a 46-day investigation, the sheriff had to arrest his young friend for arson.

Fire, the enemy of many small towns, also destroyed the town’s city hall in 2010 and a popular bar and restaurant in 2014. But both the city hall and courthouse have been rebuilt. Motorists driving Highway 12 on a Sunday morning can get a taste of local flavor by stopping at the McIntosh City Hall, where school groups or community clubs almost always host a breakfast and lunch to raise funds for some local project.

Schock, the county commissioner and local historian, says Corson County has other interesting places for adventurous visitors to explore. He recommends an old church at Kenel with an unusual pulpit carved of local cottonwood. Sitting Bull’s home site, where he was killed in 1890, lies west of McLaughlin and the great chief’s grave is on the eastern edge of the county overlooking the Missouri River. The Lakota holy man was initially buried near Fort Yates, North Dakota. Relatives felt the burial site was not properly tended and tried legal means to return the remains to South Dakota. When all else failed, a group of Mobridge civic leaders and tribal members sneaked into North Dakota on a dark and snowy night in 1953. They dug up the rotted wood coffin, collected the bones and reburied them at the present location. Then they added 20 tons of concrete atop a new vault to discourage North Dakotans from planning a retaliatory raid.

Schock says the towns of McLaughlin and McIntosh once were bitter rivals, but today’s sparse population seems to have ameliorated the competition.”If you aren’t agriculture-minded, you don’t have much of a chance to make a living here today,” he says.”And it’s tough if you are in agriculture, too.”

Brenda Carroll reopened a cafe in Watauga that had housed a museum famous for a collection of cowboy memorabilia.

A once-fierce rivalry between the McLaughlin High School Midgets and the McIntosh Tigers has diminished, and now the Midgets have succumbed to political correctness. The moniker dated to 1916 when nearby Wakpala had a tall basketball team and McLaughlin had some”smaller Roosian boys,” as the legend goes. The editor of the local paper referred to his team as the Midgets and it stuck until last year, when the local school board bent to pressure from the Little People of America to find a new mascot. They settled on the Mustangs.

McLaughlin never won a basketball championship, but Ed Walker says it had one of the state’s top swimming teams for decades. Walker, a McLaughlin native who came home to teach and ended up as mayor for 25 years, helped lead an effort to build an indoor/outdoor pool that was the envy of towns throughout the region.”Our little town of 600 competed against Sioux Falls and Rapid City,” he says.”We had some good swimmers.”

Walker says the town also became one of the first to bury all of its electrical lines. That happened after he spearheaded an effort to sever McLaughlin’s ties with a big utility and organize the city’s own municipal electric department.”It took us six votes to get that done. They called us the city of elections, but we got it passed. Then we found it was cheaper to go underground than overhead, so we were the first to do that and we lowered the rates to boot.”

Today Walker and his wife, Sharon, live in a farmhouse standing between Highway 12 and the railroad tracks.”I grew up here and we watched the trains go through day and night,” Sharon says.”In the hard times the bums would come and ask Mom for a sandwich or an apple. Dad gave the railroad a 99-year lease to expand the track on our property because it was good for McLaughlin. There were a lot of good railroad jobs in the early years.”

Her family, the Howes, and many others located their farms near the railroad tracks because the engineers were willing to stop and load livestock onto the cars.”Then the farmers could ride for free with the cattle to Sioux City or Chicago,” Sharon recalls.

Though railroad jobs are rare today, and trains hardly slow as they pass through the towns, new developments still surprise people along the old highway and tracks. At Watauga, farmers Gary and Eleanor Merkel built a new hotel in the town of two dozen people. Guests at their spacious Dakota Countryside Inn can enjoy breakfast and coffee in the kitchen, play a game of billiards and enjoy a hunting-lodge atmosphere. Just down the highway, Brenda Carroll has re-opened a tiny landmark cafe that was closed for four years. Her diners enjoy rodeo pictures, brands burned on the walls and a $5.50 steak.

Nine miles west of Watauga is another stop, Morristown, with a much larger restaurant known as Fast Eddie’s. A big American flag hangs on the west wall and, of course, local ranchers’ brands are burned on a wood wall near the door.

If today we had the opportunity to plan towns along Highway 12 and the railroad tracks, we might decide that one would be enough. But, like the people inhabiting them, each has its own West River charm. Which one would you not want?

This story is revised from the July/August 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Entertainers of Milbank

By Rich Jensen and Bernie Hunhoff

Linda Junker Buri (left) and Bridget Jensen are enjoying a revitalized Main Street in Milbank.

Milbank long ago distinguished itself with baseball, cheese, granite and a big-winged flour mill. But why stop there?

Now the Grant County town’s old shopping district has blossomed in an age when retailers nationwide are closing their doors. It’s a pleasant surprise to everyone, akin to discovering that your grandfather has some special and useful talent; who knows where it might lead but it sure feels good today.

The retailing renaissance is happening within a three-block downtown district, sandwiched on the east by a shady, old residential district and several historic churches. The 80-foot tall stainless steel milk tanks of Valley Queen Cheese are just west of Main Street. To the south stand the stately Grant County Courthouse and a towering statue of a Civil War soldier.

Other than that old bronze soldier, few people have a better perspective on Milbank’s downtown resurgence than Linda Junker Buri, who started a women’s clothing store called Linda’s in 1975 when malls were the rage. She credits the turn-around to architecture, travelers on Highway 212, visitors to nearby Big Stone Lake and hometown marketing. Once a customer comes in the door, there’s still the matter of giving them what they want.”People want service, service, service. So you must know your customers’ needs,” she says.

Buri also believes fresh attention to the city’s old architecture is making a difference. She credits that in large part to Mark Leddy, a local businessman who has overseen the restoration of several business buildings.”He has a real vision for bringing the buildings back to their original design and appearance.”

Milbank’s downtown area features a Mexican restaurant, a movie theater, a coffee shop and eatery, a cheese shop with antique dairy displays and cow bells, a furniture shop specializing in creative repurposing, a design studio with a vintage radio booth for local podcasts, a clothing store that plans local photo shoots and a book store that throws birthday parties and”book-tastings.” Main Street is as entertaining as it’s ever been.

Years ago, a big sign hung over the street with the words”You’ll Like Milbank.” It was taken down for some reason and is now stored in the basement of the cheese shop. Local business owners think it might be appropriate to rehang it soon because the city of 3,500 seems ready to deliver on the slogan’s promise.

Milbank has a history of standing apart, beginning in 1880 when it was founded as a railroad stop. Within months, the new town went to war with Big Stone City over the coveted title of county seat. After skirmishes that included shotguns, pitchforks and lawyers, Milbank won and built an impressive three-story courthouse in 1915 that has been beautifully maintained for a century.

A flour mill with four big blades, built in 1884 by an Englishman named Henry Holland, has become the town’s symbol. The city also has the distinction of being the birthplace of American Legion baseball, which began at a state Legion convention in Milbank when members voted to sponsor a national tournament. Today more than 80,000 youth play Legion ball, and half of the players in the Major Leagues are alums.

Milbank’s biggest food adventure came in 1929 when two Swiss-born Wisconsin cheese makers came to town and started a plant that now employs more than 220 people and buys milk from dairy farmers throughout the region.

The 1920s also brought the development of quarries, where granite deposits — some thought to be 15 miles deep — lie west of town. Mining the ancient deposits remains a multi-million dollar mainstay of the local economy.

So who knows where today’s Main Street renaissance will lead? Nobody could have imagined that the cheese factory, the quarries or the flour mill would be around in the 21st century. Can a new style of entertainment retail (some call it retail-tainment) also grow into something big?

Milbank storeowners are as intrigued as anyone with their role as entrepreneurial contrarians to national trends.”My husband and I have a lot of conversations about Amazon and online sellers,” notes Amy Thue, co-proprietor with her sister, Sara, of a books and gifts store called Whimsy.”It seems that people once wanted two-day shipping, and then they wanted overnight shipping. Now the pace is so fast that they don’t want to wait at all. They want it now,” she says. That means heading to the nearest store.

“I can’t say I ever imagined being in retail on Main Street,” Thue says.”You are doing odds and ends and somewhere along the way it all comes together. So here we are, with our own little piece of Main Street.”

Here are some of the interesting people and places in today’s Milbank.

THE CHEESEMAKERS

Kerry Fish (left) and Stephanie Pillatzki teach old-time cheese-making.

Grant and Brookings counties have more dairy cows than anywhere else in South Dakota because Wisconsin cheesemaker Alfred Gonzenbach drove through town in October of 1928 on his way to Montana, where he and his partner Alfred Nef hoped to find a site for a new plant.

Learning of his intentions, Milbank leaders gave Gonzenbach a tour of the town and the nearby dairy farms. They offered a deal on an empty brick water plant, and Gonzenbach never bothered to go west to Montana. By the following March they were doing business as Valley Queen Cheese Factory in Milbank. Today, Gonzenbach and Nef descendants, along with 270 employees, produce 140 million pounds of cheese a year. Nearly all their milk comes from dairy farms within 60 miles of town.

Most of the cheese is sold in 700-pound blocks to other food companies. Valley Queen has long sold family-size blocks to local people at the main office but the receptionist sometimes became too busy selling cheese to answer the phones, so the company has now opened a retail store called The Cheese Shop, adding to the momentum of Milbank’s Main Street resurgence.

“The Nefs and Gonzenbachs want to maintain the Swiss heritage and the local traditions,” says Kerry Fish, who manages the store. Swiss cowbells, antique cheese-making memorabilia and photos from the factory’s pioneer days are displayed in the store, but it isn’t all about Valley Queen. They also sell candies, pretzels and other products made by other South Dakota companies — even cheeses made by a competitor in the little town of Dimock.

A BEDROCK INDUSTRY

Workers have been mining granite from Grant County for over 100 years. The reddish brown stone crystallized more than 2 billion years ago.

I’m at Dakota Granite, standing at the bottom of a 180-foot deep quarry. They take the stone out in 3-by-6-foot slabs called loaves, lifting them with quarter-inch steel cables banded by rings encrusted with diamonds.

Once on the surface, the loaves are sliced by giant circular saws, some with blades more than 11 feet in diameter. Forty-foot long polishing machines run around the clock.

Computerization has arrived at the quarry but some tasks are better done by hand. Artisans work with hammers and chisels to shape the stone. Pat Raffety, the plant manager and part-time mayor of nearby Milbank, says his craftsmen spend two years or more mastering the skills.

Most of Dakota Granite’s products are used for countertops and memorial stones, but granite from the area has also been used on the FDR memorial in Washington, D.C., the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York and Toyota’s Tokyo offices. It also forms the first floor of the state capitol in Pierre.

— Rich Jensen

NOW AND THEN

Did you ever see a”sandwich board” store sign made from a baby crib? That’s just one of many novelties at Milbank’s Now and Then Store.”I hate to see furniture taken to the landfill,” laments the creative proprietor Carol Geisinger.”I cringe when I hear the word ëdump.’ If something has already lasted 50 or 60 years or more, it’s probably sturdy enough to be around another 50 or 60 years if you can just find a new purpose for it.”

Themed parties are business as usual for Sara Snaza (left) and Amy Thue.

WHIMSY ON MAIN

Want a better Milbank? Then build it yourself. That was the message of Jason Roberts, a national advocate of urban development, when he visited Grant County a few years ago. Amy Thue and Sara Snaza, sisters and both former school librarians, took it literally and started Whimsy, a fun-filled shop that sells books, toys, crafts, gifts and home dÈcor. They organize kids’ themed birthday parties for busy moms, and book readings for children. They started Whimsy in another location before buying an old jewelry shop (safe and all) for $35,000; their husbands helped them remodel it into a stylish store that exemplifies Milbank’s embracement of retail-tainment.

URBAN THREADS

Lindsey Keller taught first graders and ran her clothing store, Urban Threads, part-time before taking the business plunge and opening full-time in an historic building on Main Street. She features women’s clothing and some lines for men and youth. As one of many female entrepreneurs in town, she’s quick to note that the spouses are often full partners. Her farmer-husband can run the cash register and the tagging gun.”Tyler even went to market with me in Chicago and he picked out some of the men’s shirts,” she says.”I could not do this without him.”

Craig and Sarah Weinberg bring creativity, energy and three children (Edward, Calvin and Penelope) to Main Street.

VPD STUDIO

Sarah Weinberg and her husband, Craig, came to Grant County from Oregon to care for her aging grandparents.”We never thought it would be a permanent situation,” says Craig.”But the community was fantastic. We got a house in town and then we got a building on Main Street.” He runs a photography and design studio, and she holds art classes. Both have immersed themselves in local culture. Sarah started a”Milbank Rocks” program, helping kids paint rocks and hide them as surprises around town. Craig worked with local high school students to produce a video titled”Why Milbank: Telling the Stories of Our Communities.” He also built a sound studio for podcasting and is now encouraging college students to talk of their relationships with their hometown. He and a friend also produce The David Allen Show, a series of political podcasts.

MUSCLE CARS

Not all of Milbank’s interesting businesses are downtown. Jim Gesswein’s car dealership is on Highway 15, on the south edge of the city. He’s been selling cars since the early 1960s, and in the last 25 years he’s become a collector and seller of America’s favorite”muscle cars,” family-size sports cars with big V-8 engines. Gesswein likes vehicles from the ’60s and ’70s, and he likes the people who like such cars even more.”I sold a ’64 Imperial to a couple from Sweden who came out, picked it up and drove it to the Black Hills before they went back. I still hear from them every couple weeks.”

— Rich Jensen

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.