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The Makings of a Town

By Bernie Hunhoff

Dick Hughes and his sons Barry (center) and Todd (left) operate Pete’s Produce.

Small businesses add flavor to a small town, and Alcester is a good example. Hanging near the front door of Pete’s Produce is the head of a moose shot in 1929 by the store’s namesake and founder, Pete Hughes, who bought furs, sold baby chicks and bought eggs from local farmers. Today, Pete’s is a hardware and feed store.

“We still have a lot of smaller farmers and some who raise livestock,” says Barry, Pete’s grandson.”That’s who we’re here for. We are starting to see the bigger operations, too, but they don’t like to farm our rolling hills.”

The rustic wood floors and high, ornate ceiling would be the envy of a big-city, upscale coffee shop. But this is the real thing; little has changed since Pete hung the moose on the wall.

“There are not too many places left in a town of 800 where you can get a bolt or an extension cord or some wire or get an old electric fencer fixed, plus get fertilizer and feed for the critters,” says Maggie Gillespie, an Alcester business woman and farmer’s wife.

The current operators are Barry and his brother, Todd, and their dad, Dick. All three are avid deer hunters, their whitetail mounts hang near grandpa’s moose.

The Hughes family’s deer trophies hand inside the grocery store alongside Grandpa Hughes’ moose mount.

Pete’s isn’t the oldest business in town. That honor probably goes to the Alcester Union, the weekly newspaper started 125 years ago. Paul Buum, the editor and publisher, is another fan of Pete’s.

“I’ve known the Hughes family my entire life,” he says.”Good people. I don’t remember much about Pete because he passed away when I was pretty young. Dick served as fire chief for many years, and Todd served as chief for 28 years. He decided to step down about three years ago and I was elected chief. Barry is my assistant chief.”

Alcester State Bank, a year younger than the newspaper, has been operated by the same family since 1919 when E.F. McKellips came to town — but not continuously. The bank closed during the Great Depression, costing many local citizens their deposits.

But E.F. became a legend when he later re-opened the bank and worked day and night for 20 years until he had repaid every depositor. Two generations later, people still talk about it.

E.F.’s son Roger, now retired, was a popular silver-haired Democratic leader in the state legislature for many years and a gubernatorial candidate in 1978. Today, Roger’s son Gary heads the bank, which employs 27 people.

Two manufacturing plants, Alkota Cleaning Systems and Custom Coils, provide more than 150 jobs. They and the bank are all on Iowa Street, a one-way north-south avenue.

“We don’t have a stoplight, but we have a one-way street,” laughs McKellips.”It was just a way to add parking and keep the cars moving. I don’t think anyone’s ever been arrested for going the wrong way.” Neither will you be ticketed for parking in the center of Second Street, the main boulevard. It’s a tradition dating back longer than anyone can remember.

One of the bank’s most interesting workers was DeeCort Hammitt, a teller who made change by day and played music into the wee hours of the morning.”He came home from the bank and beat the piano half to death, clean up to midnight when his wife would finally have to hit him on the head and tell him to come to bed,” says Bob Hammitt, a nephew.

Dan Avery (pictured with his children Shoshanna and Benaiah) and his family run a pasta factory in Alcester.

DeeCort led the Alcester Town Band. In 1927, he and the band entertained President Calvin Coolidge at Custer State Park. They went to the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 and 1934 as the official agricultural band. He wrote and published many songs, including To a Prairie Lullaby for Lawrence Welk, who often played at The Ritz, a dance hall near Beresford, in the 1940s. DeeCort is best remembered for composing South Dakota’s official state song, Hail South Dakota, in 1943. He and his wife, Bessie Jane, raised 11 children (including six sons who served in WWII), and many of them had musical talent.

Alcester’s newest business is Dakota Earth, a pasta factory operated by Dan and Elizabeth Avery and their children. Pasta and noodle making was just a family hobby until two years ago, when the Averys started selling garden produce at farmer’s markets. Elizabeth suggested that they sell pasta in the off-season.

“We went to the Vermillion Farmer’s Market hoping to sell 10 bags and we sold 70,” Dan says. Last year, operating out of the family kitchen, they moved 30,000 bags. Pasta supplies and equipment were taking over the house, so this summer they bought an empty furniture store on Main Street and began a remodeling project. Soon they’ll have a retail shop, factory space and offices.

Dan hasn’t had time to study why their Dakota Earth products are so popular, but he believes its because the company is small enough to monitor the freshness and quality of the ingredients, and”my wife is brilliant at knowing just how to make the flavors come out.”

Italian tomato basil is a favorite, along with spinach garlic and sweet red onion. Four regional distributors are hungry for the factory to reach full speed; one says it’ll take all they can make, but first the family has to finish remodeling. McKellips’ bank handled the financing, and Pete’s Produce is also helpful.

“I bought a screw gun there the other day, and later I checked the price on Amazon. Pete’s was five dollars cheaper. I was sold. You’re my hardware store now,” he said, looking out the factory window and across the street.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Comeback City

By Paul Higbee

Children dance to live music in Huron’s Campbell Park. Family Nights are held each Thursday during the summer.

It’s my favorite South Dakota trivia question: Who were the two U.S. senators born in Huron?

Lots of South Dakotans answer quickly although, I’m sorry to say, they’re almost always wrong. You’ll find the answer later in this article, but my point is that South Dakotans generally say they know Huron well when, in fact, they could benefit by taking a closer look.

South Dakotans think they know Huron because so many of us have traveled there year after year, since childhood, for the State Fair. What’s more, Huron historically has been South Dakota’s center — not its geographic center, but for decades the approximate center of East River. It’s been known as a center for homesteading, organized labor, women’s suffrage and basketball — for many years it boasted the state’s premier arena for state high school hoops tournaments.

Dakota Avenue is Huron’s main street, where you can find everything from homemade donuts in the morning to live music at night.

Jeanne Cowan remembers moving to Huron as a child in the 1950s after her father contracted polio.”St. John’s Hospital was a regional center for polio treatment,” she said.”I grew up thinking Huron was the best town anywhere. It had the big Armour plant, lots of railroad traffic, recreation at Ravine Lake and professional baseball in summer.”

In the 1950s and’60s it seemed Huron had everything a major South Dakota community could want — except for something it once worked hard for but couldn’t swing: the state capital. In 1890, when South Dakotans voted to select their capital city, Huron was a 10-year-old town bursting with energy and confidence. Established by the Chicago and North Western Railroad as a construction camp, railroad of officials named the community for the indigenous Huron people several hundred miles east. It seemed an odd choice considering there were plenty of local American Indian names to celebrate, but the moniker stuck. Huron grew quickly as a jumping off point for homesteaders after a land office opened in 1882. Thousands of farm families began working the surrounding land as the 1880s progressed. Huron civic leaders in 1890 were confident they could land capital city designation because of their town’s easy access by rail, and because South Dakota’s population spread so evenly from this booming center.

But voters thought otherwise and gave Pierre the nod. In 1898 Huron gained a measure of revenge when Pierre University, a Presbyterian school, moved east to become Huron College. John and Mamie Pyle worked diligently to bring the college to town, and after John’s death Mamie devoted years to ensuring the school’s success. Yet that’s not why she’s remembered a century later. Mamie and her daughter Gladys led the movement to win South Dakota women the right to vote. Gladys not only voted, but in 1922 she became the first woman elected to the South Dakota State Legislature. Later she was elected South Dakota Secretary of State and, yes, she’s one half of the answer to that trivia question. In 1938, Pyle won an election to complete the last two months of the late Sen. Peter Norbeck’s term. When she retired from politics, Pyle reinvented herself as a successful Huron businesswoman and was active in community affairs for most of her 98 years. After her death in 1989, her home was made into a fine museum that remains open today.

Cousins Gus Marcus (left) and Todd Manolis run Manolis Grocery, started by their grandpa, Gus Manolis, in 1921. Today the store is famous for lunch sandwiches and cold beer – and for the interesting local characters who hang out there and were captured in oils by local artist Doug Dutenhoffer in a mural that hangs high on the shelves.

As Pyle made a name for herself in politics, a talkative and affable young man was working in his dad’s Huron drugstore and considering a career in pharmacy. Other vocational interests came into play, though, and Hubert Humphrey went on to win election as Minneapolis mayor, U.S. Senator from Minnesota and Vice President of the United States. Not surprisingly Humphrey is the most common reply to the trivia question about Huron-born senators but, in fact, was born in Wallace. In the 1960s especially, during Humphrey’s vice presidency, countless travelers moving across South Dakota via U.S. Highway 14 stopped to visit the Humphrey Drugstore. It stood second only to Wall Drug as a South Dakota pharmacy turned tourist attraction. Visitors learned about Humphrey’s early life here and discovered this was where he met Huron-born and Huron College-educated Muriel Buck. The two married. After his vice presidency, Humphrey again represented Minnesota as a senator, and when he died in office Muriel was appointed to succeed him until a special election could be arranged. So, two Huron-born senators, both women, Pyle a Republican and Humphrey a Democrat.

Half a century ago Huron was launching other big time careers, too, as baseball’s Philadelphia Phillies and then the Chicago Cubs fielded farm teams within view of actual farms at Memorial Field Stadium. One of the best-remembered players is Larry Hisle, destined for a fine career with the Twins and Brewers. In 1968, Dallas Green managed the Huron Phillies, 12 years before he managed the Philadelphia Phillies to the team’s first World Series title. Key contributors to that 1980 world championship were catcher Greg Luzinski and infielder Manny Trillo, both of whom played for Green at Huron.

The state fairgrounds hosts several livestock exhibitions, including a 2014 show where Jack Bratland, of Willow Lake, brought his sheep, Jetta.

But by the time those three Phillies celebrated in 1980, things weren’t going so well in their former South Dakota summer home. There was less railroad activity everywhere, and when South Dakota’s two interstate highways had been completed, Huron sat far removed. Some observers saw Huron as emblematic of the challenges South Dakota communities would face without direct access to I-90 or I-29. Huron experienced plant closures over the next several years, including Armour Meat packing in 1983 and Dakota Pork in 1997. There was some talk, although it never got far, that maybe the State Fair would do better at an interstate highway location. Huron College became Huron University but struggled with finances. It dropped its Presbyterian affiliation as a series of owners tried to nudge the school toward profitability. Its final iteration was as Si Tanka University, owned by the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. But the university closed in 2005 after 108 years in Huron.

It was then that South Dakotans most definitely had to take a harder look at Huron to see past gloomy headlines. Yes, forecasters in the 1980s had been right. Huron would know struggles but, as this state’s history proves over and over, struggles can bring out the very best in South Dakotans. Huron’s residents stepped forward with ideas and, in many cases, their own dollars to move their community forward. Today Huron is a city of 13,000 with a promise of employment for skilled workers. Manufacturing turns out products ranging from tractor and combine parts to steel prison doors. Welders are especially in demand. In 2007, a Hutterite- owned turkey plant, Dakota Provisions, opened and today employs about 800 people who process more than 20,000 birds daily.

Melanie Harrington had a vision of run-down Ravine Lake becoming a family-friendly destination. She worked with the city to clean up the lake area and create Putters and Scoops, where visitors can rent paddleboats, play mini-golf and indulge their kids with old fashioned hard ice cream.

The new industries have attracted a culturally diverse workforce, including Hispanic men and women and refugees from Burma.”Over the past six or seven years we’ve seen cultural changes, and that’s been good for Huron,” says chamber of commerce director Peggy Woolridge.”As a state, I think we need that diversity. In Huron we’re seeing some of these new residents starting to serve on boards and take on other types of leadership, which means they consider this home.”

Huron remains a center for many of the state’s agricultural agencies, notes Jim Borszich, president and CRO of greater Huron Development. Those include the state offices of the Farm Bureau, Farmers Union and Farmers’ Home and Rural Development. Where better than Huron?”We have lots of other things contributing to the local economy, but what drives the market in Beadle County is agriculture,” Borszich said.”Our farms have done well in recent years as far as production, but of course commodity prices are a concern.”

When Borszich describes Huron to outsiders who might consider bringing a business here, he stresses excellent schools and healthcare and a quality of life for families that some Americans can no longer imagine.

Melanie Harrington certainly could, though.”Living in Denver, our hearts bled to come to a place like Huron to raise our kids,” she recalls. She and her family arrived in Huron a few years ago, and today Harrington is a woman Huron residents cite over and over as a contributor to local quality of life. Working with the city’s Parks and Recreation Department, she used flowers and quality ice cream to transform an area adjacent to Ravine Lake and a golf course. A 1930s swimmers’ changing house became Putters and Scoops, featuring South Dakota State University ice cream and other menu items, plus golf cart, paddleboat and kayak rentals and rounds of miniature golf.”But flowers are our signature,” Harrington says.

Owner Kevin Tompkins is renovating Huron’s historic Hattie and Henry Drake octagon house, built in 1893. The wrought iron fence bordering the property came from a cemetery at De Smet. Tompkins and a partner are also restoring Huron’s Masonic Temple into an events center.

Another colorful addition to the community is Splash Central, a sprawling water park that opened in 2013 in the middle of town. Because it sits amid mature trees, newcomers might guess it’s been a park for generations, although the waterslides are obviously new. Actually Splash Central occupies the former campus of Huron College. To the best of anyone’s knowledge it’s the world’s only university reincarnated as a water park (two campus buildings survive, used as a fine arts center and community learning facility).

Through the years Huron has maintained its status as a favorite center for big gatherings, beginning with the State Fair. The fair is doing fine now with a tight, five-day schedule in late summer. Unlike some other state fairs, South Dakota’s hasn’t lost its agricultural focus. It is, in fact, an agency of the state Department of Agriculture. Other huge gatherings at the fairgrounds have included the Wheel Jam truck show and in 2014 the National Red Power Roundup, a celebration of six decades of International Harvester machinery. The roundup drew nearly 19,000 admirers from 45 states, nine Canadian provinces and seven other nations.

Huron is also home to a full season of auto racing, the South Dakota Women’s Expo, the Spirit of Dakota award dinner and autumn events related to pheasant season.

Speaking of the famous game bird, there’s a quirky image just about every South Dakotan associates with Huron, one that’s made its way into all of our photo albums over the years. That would be the World’s Largest Pheasant, R.F. Jacobs’ 40-foot-high cement creation on the east side of town. It dates back to the 1950s. A few years ago, as the town was re-establishing itself on many fronts, citizens raised funds to refurbish the giant bird. Some towns would have decided there was more important work to tackle, and that they could let a relic from the’50s go, but not Huron. Jobs, schools, recreation and medical services are vitally important in sustaining a community. But a town certain of itself doesn’t forget those things that simply give it unique character.

Editor’s Note: Since this story appeared in our September/October 2014 issue, Mike Rounds, another Huron native, was elected to the U.S. Senate. We trust that Paul Higbee has updated his trivia question. To order a copy of that issue or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Galena’s Ghosts

By Paul Higbee

An old footbridge crosses Bear Butte Creek in Galena.


Galena, high in the Black Hills eight miles east of Deadwood, is a state treasure.

Nothing in the American West has been romanticized quite like ghost towns. But in the 21st century many of those places have deteriorated to the point that it’s hard to get a feel for the community that once thrived there. So an authentic ghost town that retains a sense of itself, as Galena does, stands out as a gem. In fact, there may be no ghost town experience in the West that tops Galena’s the second Saturday of each June. That’s when Galena is put on display with food, bluegrass music, and a long self-guided hike to historic structures–some still standing, some memorialized with markers and historic photos.

If Galena ranks as a top-drawer ghost town, thanks goes to volunteers associated with the Galena Historical Society. The pretty alpine setting works to Galena’s benefit, too. Instead of tumbleweeds rolling through this ghost town, Bear Butte Creek babbles its way down the gulch. Credit goes also to the quality of ghosts here. They include prospectors, saloon keepers (lots of those), merchants, school marms, South Dakota’s most famous coyote, a member of George Custer’s gold-finding expedition to the Black Hills, shady speculators, and at least one bloodthirsty gunslinger. Thrown together in this gulch, these real life characters played out a Western drama Louis L’Amour couldn’t top.

Galena is a quiet village surrounded by forest about eight miles east of Deadwood.

In blatant violation of the federal treaty with the Lakota people, gold seekers panned for flashes of color along Bear Butte Creek in 1875 and’76. Gold quantities were a bit disappointing. But astute prospectors recognized lead sulfide deposits, called galena, in the hillsides rising above the creek. That obviously meant lead and also, quite likely, silver. While other Black Hills towns sprang to life with visions of gold mines, Galena banked on silver. Most everyone in the Hills recognized the names of Galena’s silver mines: Sitting Bull, Richmond, Florence, Merrit No. 1, Merrit No. 2, General Cook, Alex, Chub, Cora, Emma, El Refugio, Moll, Double Rainbow, and others.

None of them made great profits but by no means were they fly-by-night operations. Many won backing from major East Coast venture capitalists, but a big portion of that money ended up in the pockets of lawyers. Galena silver mines took form immediately adjacent to one another, and sometimes on top of one another. Claims were in constant legal dispute. John McClintock, early Black Hills entrepreneur and historian, wrote that a national drop in silver value combined with”prolonged litigation by mine claimants” dashed many Galena hopes.

Still, in 1878, it appeared Galena had perhaps found a counterpart of Lead’s George Hearst, who spared no expense in developing Homestake Mine so that it became the Western Hemisphere’s biggest gold producer. Into Galena rode wealthy Colonel J. S. Davey. He first leased, and then bought, the Sitting Bull and built a great mine mill. However, Davey quickly fell into a legal dispute with the neighboring Richmond Mine operators. Richmond owners believed Sitting Bull miners, deep underground, were tunneling into their claim. Davey spent lots of money defending himself, lost, and faced even uglier charges before the first case was decided. By some accounts one Jack Gorman was connected to the Richmond Mine, but John McClintock believed Gorman owned another claim that Davey hoped to buy.

When Galena’s century-old schoolhouse faced demolition in 1983, townspeople raised funds for restoration.

Recalling what happened next, McClintock observed,”On more than one occasion, in the Black Hills, it was proven that a sure way to get a mining claim was to first ‘get’ the owner.”

Davey had a guard on his payroll named Billy Thacker, whom McClintock described as”anxious to gain notoriety as a dangerous two-gun man and killer.” He got his chance one day when Gorman stepped out of the Galena post office. Thacker verbally insulted Gorman, who replied with an angry remark and shook his fist. That prompted Thacker to draw, fire, and send Gorman to his grave.

Now Colonel Davey had another costly court case on his hands as he defended his employee. The jury, in curious reasoning not entirely uncommon in Black Hills towns of the era, decided Thacker acted in self-defense when Gorman shook his fist. But the victory further depleted Davey’s wealth, and destroyed his reputation. He eventually left town. Billy Thacker left sooner, certainly knowing he was lucky in having been spared the noose.

As all this unfolded, Galena grew into a full-fledged community with general and grocery stores, barbershop, assay office, blacksmith shop, sawmills, boarding houses and livery stables. Some Northern Hills residents took pride in knowing the names and character of all of Galena’s saloons: Sudden Death, Mint, Irish World, Dempsey’s, Cavanaugh’s and Scandalous Bill’s, to name only a few.

W.V. Doyle built the schoolhouse in 1882 and it served students until World War II. A Catholic church and a Methodist church were built, although there’s some doubt about whether any Methodist services were conducted. By some accounts the minister made off with church funds, leaving the would-be congregation to cover the building’s costs by using it as a dance and social hall.

Galena’s early mines faded away only to be replaced by late 19th century and early 20th century mining operations that embraced new milling technologies. These included the Union Hill, Gilt Edge, and Branch Mint mines, and in 1902 the Deadwood Central Railroad built a spur line to Galena. The Deadwood Pioneer Times newspaper reported that”ore shipments from the district are growing every day, and the road will soon have all it can do to handle them.”

Today the school is the starting point for Galena’s annual history hike, a fundraiser to further preserve the old mining town.

Within 10 years, though, the new mines were gone or fading fast. Galena’s population had peaked at about 800 just before 1900, but now it quickly dwindled. In the 1920s Black Hills journalist and historian Richard Hughes reported that”Galena is nothing more than a post office.”

Not quite. Galena remained a naturally beautiful spot, always cool when summer heat scorched the prairies below, and there were folks who liked it best after the mines, saloons, and stamp mills ceased their racket.

Some of the wood frame buildings fell into disrepair and the lumber was hauled away. Other structures were put to new uses. The Borsch Boarding House, for example, had catered to miners but changed to become the Borsch Resort, serving visitors seeking quiet respite in the Hills. There are still people in the region who recall Sunday drives to Galena, decades ago, for the resort’s famous chicken dinners.

In 1947 Galena’s most famous resident appeared on the scene–an icon in the true sense of the word. Tootsie, an orphaned coyote, was adopted by Fred and Esther Borsch. Fred taught Tootsie how to howl along to songs, howl greetings and goodbyes to humans, and how to behave in parades and other celebrations. Photographers and artists couldn’t get enough of Tootsie. In 1949 Governor George T. Mickelson made her South Dakota’s official animal and mascot. She toured other states as a South Dakota ambassador. Like South Dakota itself, Tootsie was colorful and not entirely tame.

ìShe tolerated me being around her, but I couldn’t pet her,” recalls Marilyn Schwaner, a young relative to Fred and Esther during the Tootsie years.”That was my dream, to pet her, but I never did until she had surgery for cancer and was groggy as she came out of it.”

Tootsie died in 1959 but her likenesses are still with us regularly, including sketches in this magazine’s pages over the years.

Marilyn spent much of her teen years attending school in Ohio, but always came to Galena for summers with her grandmother.”There’s something mystical about the Black Hills,” she says.”They draw you back.” Marilyn used to cry when she saw the Black Hills appear on the horizon as she traveled west after the school year, and she cried again when she left them in late summer. Now, happily, she lives at Galena in the house where her grandmother resided, and she commutes into Deadwood to work as a med tech at the hospital. It’s a job that keeps her busy, but she finds time to play active roles in the Galena Historical Society. Marilyn was, in fact, part of the group when it first got together in 1983 to save the 101-year-old schoolhouse. The Deadwood-Lead board of education had decided to tear the school down, but then worked with the historical group as it first raised dollars with bake sales in front of Deadwood’s Ben Franklin Store.

Galena’s cemetery, on Vinegar Hill, is the final resting place for Civil War veterans, a member of George Custer’s 1874 Black Hills Expedition and miners. Volunteers are re-marking many of the cemetery’s earliest gravesites.

Bake sale fundraising evolved into the annual history hike.”You can get a little exercise and learn some history,” advises Marilyn. You can also rest assured the dollars you spend on brats and beans will support good historical preservation.

Participants do, indeed, get exercise. The basic hike runs 3.65 miles and there’s climbing involved, up to hillside buildings and the Galena cemetery on Vinegar Hill. The route includes the school where storytellers engage listeners, the assay office, and Sammy Moll’s diggings. A climb up an abandoned railroad bed brings the Methodist steeple into view (the steeple is all that remains of the church). Then it’s on to the Catholic church, saloon sites, livery stable and Tootsie’s home. The cemetery is a fascinating stop because of ongoing work to determine who is buried where. Many of the original grave markers were wood and rotted away. Mark and Suzanne Luken have volunteered their expertise and long hours to make certain the graves of a dozen Civil War veterans are properly marked, and their lives interpreted. The Lukens also took the lead in re-marking Sarah Campbell’s grave here. She worked as a cook for Custer’s transformational 1874 expedition, was drawn back to the Black Hills, cooked for Galena area miners and died in 1888.

If 3.65 miles isn’t quite enough to quench a hiker’s thirst for history, there’s an optional 1.6-mile add-on to consider. It’s a somewhat rugged climb to the Hercules Walls. Hercules was to be the name of a mighty mine mill, and its stone foundation was skillfully completed before financing dried up. The Hercules never went into operation but its foundation walls attest to remarkable stone craftsmanship often found in Western mining regions.

It takes about 25 volunteers, some of them working very hard three days in advance, to stage Galena’s history celebration. They mark trails, set up interpretive signs and photos, prepare and serve food, tell stories, park cars, and haul trash. If the weather is good maybe 700 people will show up.

Then, after the last car rumbles away toward Highway 385, the deep quiet of the high Hills settles in. Along with fewer than 20 living friends who call Galena home year round, the ghosts have the place to themselves again.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Colombe’s Colome

By Bernie Hunhoff

Reed Petersek, a steer wrestler on the South Dakota rodeo circuit, and his wife Erin live in Colome.

An apple a day keeps the doctor away, and a good steak a week keeps an entire town happy. At least, that’s true for Colome, a cowboy enclave surviving nicely on the Tripp County prairie sea of grass and corn.

About 150 diners gather in a green metal building known as the Thayer-Waters American Legion Club every Thursday night for steaks, salads and neighborly talk. Steak Night, as it’s called, has grown to become an unusual community tradition.

Colome is in south central South Dakota, a half hour’s drive north of the Nebraska border. A dozen businesses operate there, and their names tell something about the town: Frontier Bar, Feed Mill (the local cafÈ), the Sign Inn and Scott’s Welding, for examples.

Anchoring Main Street is the stately Veterans Memorial Stadium, built to honor local World War II soldiers, where teens practice basketball. North of the big gray gym is the Legion Club, where the aforementioned steaks are fried.

Statuary welcomes guests to St. Isidore Catholic Church. Isidore is the paton saint of farmers.

“Steak night is an institution,” says Fran Hill, a local rancher, writer and food blogger who has helped with the event.”It’s almost all volunteer, only the cook and the bartender and a barmaid are paid.” The helpers bring salads, wait tables and wash dishes.

Alan Armstrong, the Colome school superintendent, says his children plan their trips back home to coincide with steak night.”And we try not to schedule school events on Thursdays because we can’t compete with that, and we don’t want to.”

Armstrong says the street is full of cars by 5:30,”and usually it’s families coming together.” Profits from the feed are mostly donated to local youth and school activities, including upkeep on the auditorium. Roger Hauf, a former mayor and owner of Hauf Floor Covering and Hardware, says Colome’s citizenry, while few, are generous to a fault.

Hauf wanted a new roadside sign when the town celebrated its centennial in 2008, and he had little trouble selling bricks 400 personalized bricks to cover the $20,000 cost. Just last year, Colome raised $700 to help buy a digital projector for the Pix Theater in Winner, even though the two towns have been rivals through the years.

And people from Winner, Gregory and other neighboring towns reciprocate by attending Steak Night — proof that the town has mellowed from wild beginnings. There might not even be a town called Colome if Chris Colombe, the town’s namesake, hadn’t survived a bloody barn dance brawl in 1894.

An 1890s-era photo of the George Pete ranch shows the barn where Chris Colombe courted and fought for his bride.

Colombe was the dashing, dark grandson of Pierre Dorion, a fur trader and friend of the Yankton Sioux who interpreted for Lewis and Clark when they pushed up the Missouri River valley in 1804.

The young cowboy was taken with a beautiful girl, Emma Brughier, and promised to meet her at a barn dance at the George Pete ranch. He brought along some buddies, because he suspected that Emma’s family and friends might not approve. Sure enough, a big fight broke out, with fists, knifes and guns. Before it was over, Colombe rode away,”with the girl in his arms and there was no one on Pete’s creek who dared to follow,” according to an historical account in the Rapid City Journal.

Colombe and Brughier married, raised three children and became successful cattle ranchers. When the Rosebud region was opened to homesteaders in 1908, they sold land to the railroad for a town to be called Winona. As soon as the lots were purchased, the name was changed to Colome. Apparently, the bloody barn dance was forgiven if not forgotten.

Colome lies in the heart of South Dakota pheasant country. Larger towns of Gregory and Winner sit to the east and west, but the little town has a competitive streak. It scored a big victory five years ago when the Wood-Witten school board agreed to a consolidation agreement, even though they were closer to Winner.

That gives the school almost 300 students. Armstrong, the superintendent, takes pride in his veteran faculty.”We have people who came here out of college and are here 30 years later. That really makes a difference.”

Richard Papousek is known throughout Gregory County for his creative remodels.

The town has 300 residents today, about half the population that it boasted in 1935 when Chris Colombe died. But there’s a thriving commercial community, and hunting services have added a new industry in the recent years. Most of the lodges are located on farms outside town but several years ago an old brick hardware store on Main Street was renovated into lodging.

The lodge’s roof collapsed due to a major drainage problem, and it was about to be bulldozed when Richard Papousek, a talented Colome carpenter, stepped forward and offered to buy it for a dollar.”Nobody else was going to save it, and the price was right,” he says.

Papousek, famous locally for his creative remodeling projects, redid the lodge and decorated it with a huge collection of old commercial signs. He calls it the Sign Inn and rents rooms for $40 a night to traveling workers and hunters.

They couldn’t find a friendlier town, or a better steak on Thursday nights.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Rush is Over

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. The businesses featured remain open, though some are under new ownership. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

Story and photos by Bernie Hunhoff

Ed Jons and his grandson, Chase, pedal past Bonesteel’s quiet downtown.

As you cross the Missouri River westward over Fort Randall Dam, Highway 18 wiggles past small farms and cedar hills. Cornfields are suddenly triangular and rectangular because the once-straight road was rerouted to reach the dam. Tight barbed wire rims many of the fields so farmers can”turn out” their cows in the stalks after the harvest.

Gregory County, which sits on the Nebraska border, still has about 600 farmers — more than most West River counties. Seven small towns are spaced nicely along Highway 18, and every town has a few leaders trying to find new reasons for their community to exist other than just to serve farmers who, even here, are thinning in number.

At Herrick, the old grain elevator has been converted to an art center. Gregory hosts a summer film festival. Burke, the county seat, has become a rodeo town and tiny Dallas, pop. 140, has the legendary Frank Day’s Bar, a veritable museum of cowboy pictures and memorabilia.

Bonesteel has the river and Lake Francis Case, just a few minutes away by car or truck. The lake covers over 77,000 acres of bottomland. Only a farmer who has plowed or cultivated an acre at a time can understand that much ground; a farmer, perhaps, and also a fisherman looking for walleye in a 16-foot boat with a 25-horse Johnson.

Members of Bonesteel’s Over 50 Club meet for coffee and cards.

Most West River towns of 300 or fewer seem sleepy when you drive past on the highway, and Bonesteel is the same. Tip your hat if you see five or more cars going the same direction because that’s probably the beginning of a funeral procession.

“We do have too many funerals,” says Marge LaFave, proprietor of the Hertz Motel for the past 36 years. Like most of rural South Dakota, the average age of the citizenry is getting older.

But spend some time in town — whether you’re there for a funeral or fishing or just passing through — and you’ll soon discover people doing interesting things. For example, Paul Neumiller hunts for ancient sea monsters. He scouts the west shore of the Missouri, near a spot where explorers Lewis and Clark found the bones of”a prehistoric fish” in 1804.

When Neumiller isn’t practicing archeology, he fishes the Missouri for walleye and catfish, or saddles up to help local ranchers”work” cattle. He also gathers with neighbors for coffee at the Over Fifty Club.

Neumiller could be the poster boy for Bonesteel and other towns near the Missouri River that offer hunting, fishing, water recreation and a laid-back atmosphere.”Gregory County is slowly becoming well known for its outdoor lifestyle,” says Joe Duling, a realtor from Gregory.”We’re just close enough to cities like Sioux Falls and Sioux City and Omaha and just far enough away.

Paul Neumiller found his first petrified fish in 1957. Today he searches the Missouri River banks for the bones of other fossilized sea creatures.

Bonesteel is also close to boat ramps and camping spots on the Missouri, and surrounded by thousands of acres of state and federal”open hunting” land. Lake Francis Case, South Dakota’s second largest body of water, stretches 107 miles from Pickstown to Fort Thompson.

Like most towns of 300 people, Bonesteel has only a few retail shops. But there is a grocery and hardware store, cafe, bar, motel, gift shop with pheasant feather arrangements and one of the best-kept old-style banks in the West.

The Lillibridge family has owned the brick bank for five generations. Tom Lillibridge and his wife, Cindy, lived in the bank’s basement for many years, but they recently built a stylish home across the street on commercial lots once owned by Tom’s father, Louis.

Before Tom and Cindy could dig a foundation, they had to buy the lots his father had given the city after he’d cleared them of old buildings and debris. That was Louis’ style, says Mark Knutson, who manages the Bonesteel bank for the Lillibridges.”If any buildings in town were vacant, Louis would purchase them and if they were any good the first thing he would do is put on a roof because he said without a roof you didn’t have anything.” Buildings beyond repair were torn down.

The son’s spectacular brick home is the type you expect to see on the 18th hole of a Sioux Falls country club rather than in the middle of a little farming town. Probably the message was unintentional but, standing on Mellette Street in downtown Bonesteel, the home clearly advertises the Lillibridge family’s confidence in the Rosebud country.‚Ä®”I came to Bonesteel from Burke in 1974 and Cindy grew up on a ranch southwest of town where her great-grandfather Julius Thoene homesteaded,” said Lillibridge.”We think Bonesteel is one of the cleanest small towns you’ll find. But the number of young people is fewer all the time. Many of our farmers are going to retire soon, and the big question is whether they’ll retire here or want to be closer to a hospital or pharmacy.”

The Lillibridge family has run banks for three generations, including the Bonesteel bank.

As mayor several years ago, Lillibridge had the idea of promoting Bonesteel at Ellsworth Air Force Base. He thought the area’s outdoor charm and small-town lifestyle might appeal to airmen. He never started an organized campaign, but it may be a good idea; retirees are buying houses in town or building in the Missouri foothills. Just walk around the town, and you’ll hear numerous explanations on why Bonesteel citizens like the area — either as a vacation spot or a permanent residence.

“We live in a place where you don’t pay to park and you don’t wait in lines,” explained Kathy Divine, who runs a concrete delivery and fabrication company with her husband, John. The size of the company might surprise people –“24 employees and 240 wheels turning” — but Divine says there’s no reason you can’t succeed in a town of 300.

“The Internet has done a lot to change that,” she says.”It’s endless opportunities here today. Maybe those opportunities are hidden but we found one. I think it’s ‘find a need and fill it.'” Along with routine concrete work, the Divines also manufacture unusual specialties, like tornado storm shelters.

Ed Jons, a partner in Bonesteel Oil Co., also found a need. He felt it was shameful that senior citizens had to leave Bonesteel when they couldn’t live on their own so he started the Haisch Haus, an assisted living center. The Haisch name is part of local lore. Curley Haisch bought the famous Mulehead Ranch in 1932 when he was just 20 years old, and then romanced Rose Riley for 25 years.”I didn’t want to marry her until I could afford her,” he later explained.

A 1958 truck accident re-arranged his priorities, and they finally wed.”Affording Rose was not a problem,” says Duling, the local realtor who is a part owner of the ranch today.”She was the solution. Working as a team, Rose and Curley built one of the most beautiful and prosperous ranches in the state of South Dakota.”

When Jons decided to build his assisted living center in the 1990s, the Haischs agreed to finance it. They became residents of the home in 2003, and lived there until Rose died in 2007. Curley died in January 2009 in nearby Burke.

Bonesteel is attractive for seniors, says Divine.”They can sell their house somewhere else for six figures and buy a nice home here for peanuts and get a steak dinner at the Teepee for $6 or $7.”

The Lillibridges built a grand house in Bonesteel, conveying confidence in the future of Gregory County.

The Teepee, like the Hertz Motel, opened when the dam was built and became a fixture on Highway 18. Proprietors John and Sue Zebro met while working in the kitchen of a South Dakota pheasant lodge. John is a Seattle native who studied at the Culinary Institute of America, the nation’s premier chef school. Sue is a native of Herrick, a 10-mile drive from Bonesteel.

They added a dash of big-city cuisine to the legendary restaurant’s meat and potatoes menu. Customers can still order a Teepee Hog Burger (charbroiled with ham, bacon, hamburger and cheese) and homemade fries are just 75 cents extra. But the Zebros also make a pepper jelly sauce for their grilled meats (“We learned it from a woman who helped at the lodge,” says John) and mix their own salad dressings. The blue cheese and other dressings are so popular that some regular customers buy them”by the jar.”

Other Bonesteel businesses also have character. Bonesteel Grocery and Hardware sells a pre-cooked beef and pork bologna made locally, along with”Bonesteel: Best Little City in America” sweatshirts. The Lillibridge bank has local historian Adeline Gnirk’s eight history books for sale at $8 each, and Knutson, the bank manager, displays his snowman collection in the lobby during the holidays.

Brands are burned into the ceiling of Mary Vogt’s gift shop. She sold craft items at fairs until she tired of the road and opened Wood”N” Stuff in a former western clothing store (thus the brands). Now she offers jewelry, crafts and gift items from 70 cents to $70 — including handcrafted pheasant and deer antler art and her own flower arrangements.

Historic photos hang on the walls of the Over Fifty Club, a non-profit founded in 1974 as a place for seniors to meet for coffee and cards. With money raised from bingo games, dances and other parties, the group bought a building and a coffee pot. Small-stake dice and card games mix with local conversation. Did you know that lightning could travel 10 miles and hit your fishing rod? Did you hear about the mountain lion that tried to crawl up an archery hunter’s deer stand by Gregory? How many years ago was the Payloader fire that burned Harry’s face and arms? Those topics and more were covered in just one afternoon session. The men sit at one big table, the women at another. Birthdays are celebrated with a cake, but usually it’s just coffee, cards and conversation.

Deer are thick in the hills around Bonesteel, and impressive whitetail mounts are everywhere; a five-point buck overlooks the grocery store. Big buck racks are also at the Teepee Cafe, Joe Laber’s insurance office, and the Over Fifty Club.

“We have some of the best walk-in hunting in the state,” says Zebro, the local chef.”Deer hunting and fishing already have a huge impact on the area and it’s only going to grow. I was down at the river today and I was thinking, ‘Why don’t we call ourselves the Gateway to Whetstone Bay?'”

The bay, buried 6 miles north of town in the Missouri River breaks, has a park, boat ramps, picnic shelters and camping spots. Eagles and hawks circle overhead, while campers share the cedars with the big whitetails and turkey.

Peace is the best adjective to describe this corner of Gregory County, whether you are in downtown Bonesteel, in the countryside or in a boat on Lake Francis Case. But it wasn’t always that way.

Businesswoman Kathy Divine still has her grandfather’s cash register. He was a pioneer merchant.

Bonesteel’s first buildings were constructed in 1892, but the town was nameless until 1893 when H.E. Bonesteel, a local merchant, offered $100 for a school if the town took his name. The town was still tiny in 1904 when the Rosebud Sioux Reservation was opened to homesteaders. Nearly 100,000 people came to enter their names in the big land rush — including future president Harry Truman. About a third of the hopefuls departed the train at Bonesteel.

Most applicants got no land (only 2,500 parcels were available), and many were hustled by gamblers, outlaws and greedy merchants. When fights and arguments ensued, a group of vigilantes rounded up the complaining out-of-towners and paraded them before a local judge, who charged them with vagrancy and ordered them out of town on the next train.

Bonesteel has never seen another maddening crowd. Basketball and football games, the Powder River Mellerdrammer and those inevitable funerals sometimes draw a hundred or more people, but on most days peace and quiet rivals white-tail and walleye as the town’s trademarks. The Divines hired a comedian to entertain at their company’s Christmas party a few years ago.”He was so amazed by the charm of the Hertz Motel that he devoted his entire routine to it,” Kathy says. He thought it was hilarious that you get a real key at the Hertz, and you can’t use your credit card. If Marge is at the Over Fifty coffee shop when you arrive to check in, regulars just grab a key and register later.

Homesteaders built Bonesteel, but its future now rests with hunters, fishermen and retirees who like a place with tasty $5 meals, clean $31 motel rooms and a welcoming atmosphere. Bonesteel has learned how to treat its guests since the days of the maddening land-rush crowds of 1904.

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A Spa at Midland

By Mikkel J. Pates

I’ve wanted to take the plunge in Midland’s hot mineral baths since I was a kid. Every summer our family would pack the station wagon and take a road trip from Brookings to my father’s childhood home, a ranch north of Philip.

Half an hour before arriving we’d pass Midland, a dusty prairie town whose rooftops were barely visible from the eastern approach. A sign beckoned,”Downtown: HOT Mineral Baths. Stroppel Hotel.” When I asked my parents what a mineral bath was, the answers were vague, something about healthful properties. My grandpa, H.W.”Herb” Pates, once told me he went to the spa to treat his sore old rancher bones.

George Stroppel’s healing hands still soothe aches and pains.

Last fall I was planning a pheasant hunt near Pierre and thought I might need such a treatment after a day of walking fields. I searched the Stroppel Hotel online. To my delight I found it still existed, but was renamed the Lava Water Inn.

I dialed the phone number and found George Stroppel. He said he was 86 years old, but he was still a masseuse at the hotel and he remembered my grandpa. I made reservations for a mineral bath and massage.

George told me to meet him at his house next door to the hotel. He cleared the dining room table, poured me a cup of coffee and began telling me the history of the Stroppel Hotel. The story began when his father, John, moved to South Dakota from Iowa in 1907 and homesteaded 19 miles southwest of Midland. In 1914 John married a neighbor girl, Violet. They grew the ranch to 5,000 acres and had five children from 1915 to 1926.

John had a lung ailment since childhood and coughed regularly. He sought relief at a mineral bath, or plunge, in Capa, 10 miles east of Midland. A doctor operated the medicinal plunge that was fed by a well originally dug for railroad steam engines. The water’s supposed curative properties were discovered by accident. One night a local drunk, who also suffered from arthritis, passed out in a ditch full of the warm water.”They say that when he came to, he didn’t ache anymore,” George says.

In the Stroppel Hotel’s early years, as many as 75 people a day sought treatment from masseuse John Stroppel.

In 1929 John visited a hot springs mineral bath in Thermopolis, Wyo., and saw potential. He tried to purchase the spa in Capa but couldn’t close a deal, so he looked at the Bastion House in Midland.

The Bastion was built as a roadhouse during the stagecoach era in 1905. The building was moved to town in 1907 because it was too close to the new railroad tracks. In the Dirty Thirties the Bastion’s business declined and it was forfeited to Haakon County due to unpaid taxes. John bought it, hired a well digger and built three plunges. The original well descended 1,780 feet. Under natural pressure, the hot, soft water flowed to the surface at 33 gallons per minute.

In February of 1940, Stroppel began selling mineral baths. The hotel had 20 rooms that rented for 50 cents a night and 75 cents for double occupancy. People suffering a variety of ills would come for a 21-day regimen. Others came regularly for Saturday night baths. Patrons would warm up in the plunge, be wrapped in blankets and lie in a bed for 30 minutes to sweat. John hired a chiropractor to come in and give treatments. But the man drank too much, so John fired him, took a Swedish massage course and discovered a natural talent.

The Stroppel Inn halted train traffic for two hours when it was moved across the tracks in 1907.

Up to 75 people came through daily. The Stroppel was particularly known for treating folks with excess alcohol or tobacco problems.”Dad used to say that it seemed to take the poisons out of their systems,” George says.”My idea was that the heat and dilating blood vessels let the blood through quicker.”

George’s older brother, John”Jack” Stroppel, was a World War II fighter pilot in the South Pacific. Jack came home, took chiropractic training and replaced his father, John, who retired in 1949.

George served as a gunner’s mate on the USS New Jersey and came home from World War II at age 20. He finished high school and married Alice. In 1955 he moved to Pierre to help build the Oahe Dam. In 1958, his father paid George’s tuition for a Swedish massage correspondence course from a school in Chicago. But George was busy building stock dams with a cat-and-scraper business in Philip, and didn’t immediately use the gift.

John died of a heart attack in 1959. Jack stayed until 1966, when he relocated to Rapid City with his wife. George and Alice moved from Philip with their six young children in 1969 to help Violet run the hotel.

George remembers his first, awkward massage.”Mom introduced me to three guys in the lobby,” he recalls.”They were taking baths. They said, ‘You’re Jack’s brother, you ought to be able to give massages.’ I told them no, I could hurt them. They just laughed and finally talked me into it. I felt like I mauled them around like an old bear.” When the men asked for a second massage, George had a new career.

George and Alice bought the place in 1973. George considered updating the hotel but was discouraged by the rising cost of building materials and the declining flow of the well. In 1977 he had a new well drilled. He installed a submersible pump that still runs today, bringing up 20 gallons a minute. The hotel cut back to two plunges and George used some of the water to heat the hotel.

The author begins a treatment with a soak in one of the spa’s plunges. The 110-degree water has been used to treat ills from sore muscles to alcoholism.

“People started asking, ‘Does medical insurance cover it?'” George says of the treatment costs.”When I said no, they started saying they had to go somewhere else where they could use the insurance. At that time medical doctors were the only ones that could collect insurance.”

After telling me the Stroppel’s history, George showed me the hotel. Inside its glassed-in, pillared porch is a utilitarian lobby that George says was probably fancy in 1907, but isn’t today. One wall has historic clippings and photographs on various surfaces. The business is operated from a vintage roll-top desk.

Behind it are doorways leading to the”plunges.” Each has a small dressing area, leading to another door that opens to concrete stairs descending into the water. The 8-by-8 foot tanks are four feet deep. Light streaming through glass blocks glows off white fiberglass walls. The hot water pours in from a PVC pipe above the bath surface. A standing pipe”drain” is in the concrete, taking overflow to Mitchell Creek east of town.

The treatment lasts about an hour. Step one is a soothing soak for 15 minutes. The water is about 110 degrees, depending on the weather. George tells me to immerse a shoulder that has been bothering me, and move it around. The charge for the bath is $4. Step two is a 45-minute massage. George employs the Swedish massage method, using techniques he’s honed on countless patients. The massage charge is $40.

In 1998, George and Alice sold the hotel to their oldest daughter, Patricia, and her husband, Reuben Vollmer, a local maintenance man. In 2004, the Vollmers sold it to Jill O’Neill of New Florence, Pennsylvania. The Vollmers managed it for O’Neill until 2012, when they recruited Kathy Jensen of Sioux City, Iowa, to take their place. Jensen’s family owns and runs the Bio-Chi Institute of Massage Therapy in Sioux City. She first visited the hotel in the early 2000s and was intrigued. She now operates the business as the Historic Lava Water Hotel.

George says he isn’t getting rich, but he’ll keep working as long as he’s able and as long as people get results.”Massage takes a lot out of you,” George said.”But it also gives you a lot.” He believes in the healing powers of the bath.”Think of the thousands of people who have come through and gotten help from it,” he says.

About the Author: Mikkel Pates is a Brookings native. He spent 17 years writing ag stories for The Forum of Fargo. He currently writes for the Grand Forks Herald and Agweek.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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South Dakota’s Little Finland

Story and Photos by Bernie Hunhoff

Small town citizens bleed time and money to keep their communities alive. South Dakota’s best example might be Frederick (pop. 250), one of our northernmost cities. Farmers can still buy and sell corn in town. Neighbors share cups of coffee, stock up on groceries, dine on authentic Mexican specialties and meet for beers — but only because Frederick residents showed their stubborn Scandinavian streak when faced with adversity.

Teresa and Scott Campbell are fifth generation bankers in Frederick, a Brown County town where history and traditions are becoming a routine part of community life and economic development.

The stubbornness started in the mid 1980s when the grocery store was about to close. Several dozen people pooled their money and bought the store; then they elected a board of seven to oversee the place. The Community Store now grosses $250,000 a year and has become the town’s daytime hub. Men meet there for coffee even before the lights come on.

“We don’t open until 8, but I’m usually here early so I just leave the front door open, and there might be a dozen guys here by 7:30,” says Jim Ulmer, the store manager.”They don’t always stay long unless it’s raining, and then they’ll hang around until 10.” Women gather for coffee at 10:30, and depending on the weather the men might reconvene in the late afternoon from 4:30 to 6.

Frederick’s farmers did the same a decade later when South Dakota Wheatgrowers Cooperative no longer wanted to operate the old, wood-frame grain elevator on the west side of town. Several dozen farmers pooled their resources to keep it open as a place to trade grain and purchase livestock feed. Since then, they’ve added a million bushels of grain storage and a modern truck loading system.

Another potential setback came in the late 1990s when Frederick’s restaurant and bar burned to the ground, leaving citizens without an all-important watering hole (the town hosts a wife-carrying race every June, so perhaps a drinking establishment is essential for the victory celebration). A group of people raised money and built a new building owned by the Frederick Development Corporation. Nicholas White and his sister, Bonnie, lease the bar, opening at 3 every afternoon. The Whites hired Marco Rangel, a Hispanic chef who treats the town to Mexican specialties made from scratch on Friday nights.

Brown County is a wildlife paradise, and an opportune setting for taxidermists Mark Wooledge (left) and Lance Burns. Their shop is on Frederick’s main street.

A belief in collective ownership (some might call it modified socialism) may be engrained in the genes of many residents who date their ancestry to Finns who settled northern Brown County at the suggestion of a railroad official in the 1880s. Many of the settlers came from the forested province of Savo in Finland, and today some of their descendants still live and farm in Savo Township, and worship Sunday mornings at Savo Lutheran Church.

Others rest in the North and South Savo cemeteries. Their memory is honored every June with a Finn Fest that includes the aforementioned wife-carrying competition and a boot-throwing contest. World championships for those events are held in small farming towns in Savo province, which is not far from the Arctic Circle.

Frederick’s locale — 26 miles north of Aberdeen along Highway 281, just shy of the North Dakota border — is tropical by comparison. Only 250 people live within the city limits, but the town’s high school keeps rural families involved for miles around. The school, a handsome old brick structure at the east end of Main Street, educates about 200 students in 12 grades.

Main Street also has businesses that survive without collective ownership, most notably First National Bank, run by the Campbell family since 1914. Scott Campbell swept floors there as a teen, and eventually was promoted to teller. Today he is the fifth-generation bank president, making loans in the same stone building where his great-grandfather worked. Pictures of First National’s past presidents are framed on the east wall. Banking may be more profitable in other places, but Scott and his wife, Teresa, a former teacher who also works in the bank, say Frederick is where they want to be.

“I grew up here, I like the small-town atmosphere and I love dealing with the customers,” said Scott.

“And you love to hunt and fish,” said Teresa with a grin.

Frederick noted its 125th year in 2007 by starting a museum in an old saloon and by building a sod house.

Pheasant, waterfowl and deer are everywhere in Brown County, which is home to the sprawling 21,000-acre Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge. The maze of lakes, cattails, grasslands and trees has 266 species of birds and is considered one of America’s best bird-watching sites.

The area’s bounty of wildlife helps to account for another Frederick business, Lone Wolf Tanning & Burns Taxidermy, just up the street from the bank. Lance Burns and Mark Wooledge practice their art under the stolid eyes of whitetail, walleye and other critters.”We’ll do close to a hundred deer this year,” Burns said,”along with 20 buffalo heads. And we’ll tan a lot of buffalo hide and do a lot of fish.” One of their next projects is a nine-foot grizzly shot in Alaska by a North Dakota outfitter.

Frederick hadn’t had a gas station for several years, so you can imagine the enthusiasm when Jim Dumire re-opened the old Coop Service Station a year ago. But the town is getting much more than unleaded gas and free air. Dumire and his wife, Kay, returned to their hometown with a wealth of ideas and enthusiasm.

The Dumires, lifelong historians and collectors, located an antique store in the station’s repair shop, and soon will open an old-time ice cream parlor near the curved-glass window in the lobby.”The place wasn’t all that bad,” Jim said.”It just needed some TLC.”

They are also active in the museum, located down the street from the station.”We have two schoolhouses to move there to refurbish,” Jim says.”A bunch of us are trying to resurrect Main Street. That’s what we’re doing. We’ve got a half-dozen younger folks who are really energetic and some old-timers like me. It takes all kinds to make things work.”

Dumire apologized for being hard to find on the day we visited town. He was attending a grant-writing seminar in Fargo, hoping to learn tricks on how to raise money for the museum and other town projects.”We’d also like to fix the old city auditorium,” he says. The roof caved in on the grand, concrete structure a few years ago, and it now sits vacant.

One of Frederick’s alleys is beautifully landscaped thanks to Mel Glarum.

But the rear of the auditorium is attractive, thanks to 88-year-old Mel Glarum. She came to town in 1945 with her husband to run the pharmacy, which was just east of the auditorium. The Glarums lived in an apartment in the back, and that’s where we met Mel — tending to flowers and bushes in the back alley. Her landscaping extends to the back of the auditorium as well as to another century-old building to the west. The blend of greenery, flowers and old architecture give Mel’s back alley a European flavor. You get the feeling that if she were a few years younger she’d extend the look on down the street.”I guess I could move anywhere if I wanted to,” she said. Her three daughters have all left the state.”But the town is quite special to me.”

The pharmacy closed when her husband died in the 1960s. Today a community library is located in her building. A post office, senior center and the museum are other notable stops on Main Street, plus a 1916 jailhouse, once featured in Smithsonian magazine, that still seems sturdy enough for one-night sentences.

The senior center hosts pancake breakfasts every Saturday morning during hunting season as a fundraiser for Finn Fest. Volunteers fry traditional pancakes, and they also bake platter-size Finnish pancakes topped with syrups made from local berries.

The museum is a new organization fittingly housed in one of the town’s most historic structures, a social hall where Masons met and school events were held. Later it became a saloon. Near the museum is a new sod house, built in 2007 as a project for the town’s 125th birthday party, which was the genesis for today’s Finn Fest.

Midsummer celebrations were held years ago at Savo Hall, northeast of town. Services at Savo Church across the road were still spoken in Finnish in the 1940s and 1950s. Today’s members pray and sing in English, but many can still speak their ancestors’ language, and several families keep in contact with their overseas cousins.

Germans settled on the farms north of Frederick. Norwegians and Swedes also helped start the town. But they all join gaily in the new Finn Fest, and much of the fun centers around the boot-throwing and wife-carrying contests. Quite specific rules are established for both competitions. Boots must be thrown underhanded, for example. And while the wife-carrying contest doesn’t require a marriage certificate or even a ring, the female does have to weigh at least 108 pounds. And it’s not a simple race: the”wife” must be carried 780 feet, past water hazards, logs, bushes, low-hanging branches and other obstacles.

The festival also features a juhannuskokko, or midsummer bonfire, an observance that dates to pre-Christian times in Finland when evil spirits were warded off by bonfires on the lakes. Frederick residents try their best to authenticate the event. Dale Groop, a local farmer and jack-of-all-trades, builds a raft that is floated onto the Maple River in Simmons Park. Finn Fest leaders hoped to light the structure with a flaming arrow shot from shore, but that proved to be harder than it looks in old Viking movies. One of the festival promoters learned that sparklers tied to a tampon stay lit in the air, but that hardly sounds like a real Finnish solution. For now, Groop rows out in a canoe and ignites the ceremonial raft with a barbecue lighter.

Some ways are better in the New Country.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2010 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Philip: The Rugged West

By Paul Higbee

On horseback and in wagons, adventurers rode for a week in July 2011 across prime shortgrass country, along the Bad River from Philip to Fort Pierre. Could there have been a better way to honor Scotty Philip, the man credited with saving the buffalo and for whom the town is named? Scotty would recognize every stream and butte along the route.

Born in 1858 at Morayshire, Scotland, Scotty is best remembered as for his buffalo conservation, although South Dakotans of his era knew him just as well as a cattle baron, financier and legislator. He always seemed bigger than life, and the state was stunned when he died suddenly on July 23, 1911 at age 53.

In the 1880s, still in his mid-20s, Scotty grazed cattle along the Bad River. By 1891 letter writers across America could address an envelope to Philip, South Dakota, and it would come to a makeshift post office near Scotty’s ranch headquarters. Most of the letters (and bills) were for his own cowhands. This rural post office proved remarkably mobile the next several years, bouncing from ranch to ranch. The post office ended up at today’s Philip townsite after the Chicago and North Western announced its rails were coming through, connecting Pierre and the Black Hills. By the time the first locomotive rumbled its way to the site in June 1907, businesses had sprung up, including the 73 Saloon. The saloon is still serving drinks today. Scotty Philip had called his cattle outfit”The 73,” and the saloon founder was Slim Taggert, a 73 cowboy.

Sign painter Barry Knutson’s customers include Wall Drug, Al’s Oasis and other West River must-stops. Most of his billboards are along U.S. highways, but he created a Wall Drug sign in Italy while serving there in the National Guard.

Another early Philip business was the North Western Hotel, where homesteaders who rode the rails into town slept, ate and met locators who showed them prospective farm sites. Among those who stepped off the train in 1908 was Besse Gause, 24 years old, single and from Iowa. She established a homestead and landed a teaching job in a one-room school. Her life was later profiled as part of the Daughters of Dakota historical collection. Besse’s adult daughter wrote that she wondered why her mother opted for such a hardscrabble existence.

Suffice it to say some people are drawn to the Dakota prairie, the more remote the locale, the better. Marie Slovek, like Besse a teacher, is a modern day example. Originally from Chicago, vacations west told Marie she was cut out for a life removed from city lights. Still, when she pulled into Philip several years ago, she recalls,”I thought I’d teach third grade for the nine-month school year and maybe move on. But I absolutely fell in love with the area and the town.”

That relationship was cemented when Marie suffered a house fire in Philip.”By the next morning,” she says,”people had arranged for a place for me to live, and I had furniture, appliances, food and clothing. People in Philip really look out for one another.”

She stayed, married buffalo rancher Dwight Slovek, and became the school’s technology coordinator and elementary computer teacher.”When my family visits from Chicago,” Marie notes,”they’re awed. They sit on the deck at night and see no man made lights, or in the day they can watch weather moving in, watch it before it happens.”

Kerry Hostetler (pictured with her son, Jesse) is a rancher’s wife who runs a flower shop in Philip.

Philip puts the surrounding vastness to creative use. Early residents took the lead in complaining that Stanley County was too vast, that it should be broken up to create two or more additional counties. They believed Philip sat perfectly positioned to serve as a county seat, which it became in 1914 after Haakon County was established. Municipal leaders also worked to make certain Highway 14 was routed their way, and in 1935 won support for a municipal auditorium. The idea was to create the region’s main center for live entertainment and athletics. The brick structure went up fast after gaining Works Progress Administration (WPA) designation. For the next quarter century Philip hosted district high school basketball tournaments and popular dances featuring big band leaders Lawrence Welk and Tommy Dorsey.

In the early 1960s, just as the shine had worn off the auditorium (the historic building is now a well-stocked Hardware Hank), Art Kroetch decided it was time to take his Philip salvage yard enterprise in a new direction. He started Scotchman Industries, a manufacturer any community — big or small — would be proud to claim. First Kroetch and his crew built heavy-duty farm and ranch products: corral panels, chutes, gates, and pickup racks. In the process the company acquired enough modern metal working know-how to manufacture its own metal fabricating systems, beginning with an innovative hydraulic ironworker. Kroetch, who died in 2007, aggressively pursued international markets, and the company he founded remains a worldwide industry leader.

Mark Buchholz and his son, Kent, operate Kennedy Implement, a farm machinery headquarters.

Art Kroetch”had the community of Philip in his heart” says his son, Jerry, who is current Scotchman Industries president. Indeed, the company is a key to how Philip has successfully weathered ag country’s economic ups and downs, steadily maintaining a population of about 800 over the decades. Today there are 60 Scotchman Industries employees.

Visitors find an intriguing small town — and not just because of the storied hardware store and 73 Saloon. Center Avenue, two blocks long, is understated until an observer takes a look at the array of small businesses — a steakhouse, attorney, pharmacy, several bars, Cattle Business Weekly newspaper (“For cattlemen — by cattlemen”), a variety store, insurance, auto parts. And there’s something most unusual for a town of less than a thousand residents. The Gem, with 212 seats, is a first-run movie theater.

“We’re the only movie theater between Pierre and Rapid City,” says Amy Moses, whose family owns and operates the Gem. In saying that she echoes the way dozens of Philip entrepreneurs have promoted their businesses over the years. At the Gem, $6 will buy an adult admission (a dollar less at matinees) and a sack of large popcorn is just $1.50. Once in a while movie-goers will drive more than an hour from Rapid City, not surprising given the reasonable prices and the pretty prairie drive most summer evenings. First-time visitors see the Gem as something of a museum piece in this age of multiplexes.”It goes clear back to the silent movie days,” says Moses, pointing out show bills from that era, displayed on the walls. The original ticket booth — a narrow booth, indeed, with room for one ticket seller — stands in the middle of the lobby. Movies run Friday through Monday.

A favorite hangout for local ranchers is the Philip Livestock Auction Barn. Cattle sales are held on Tuesdays, and the popular cafe is open daily. Gathered (from left) are Jake Schofield, Barry Barber, Boyd Waara and Thor Roseth, the owner and operator.

Although it has its charms, like the Gem, Philip overall exudes a feeling of West River ruggedness and functionality. It’s not a place that seeks the label”quaint.” Residents know, too, that there’s always been more interest statewide in Scotty Philip the man, than Philip the namesake town.

Today’s historians are quick to explain that Scotty Philip had help in saving the buffalo, beginning with Frederick Dupree. Both men ended up with South Dakota towns named after them. And both made fortunes on cattle, in part because their marriages to Indian women allowed them to graze stock on the Great Sioux Reservation. Dupree, his sons, and probably some ranch hands captured five buffalo calves in 1883. After Frederick died in 1898, Scotty bought the buffalo. When he died in 1911, the herd had grown to over 900 head. Five years later, part of the herd moved west to Custer State Park, an event that was key to the buffalo’s comeback both regionally and nationally.

Some historians consider Scotty Philip and Frederick Dupree emblematic of the culture that jeopardized the buffalo’s existence in the first place. Even such critics, though, agree both men were likely influenced by their wives, and their wives’ extended families, to see buffalo as more than mammoth pests.

Out there on the prairie, after the wagons stopped rolling for the night, all that history made for good talk under the stars.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2011 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Murdo’s 1880 Town

Story by Paul Higbee

Photos by Johnny Sundby

Movie producers started an Old West main street on Clarence Hullinger’s land in the 1970s. The movie failed, but today the 1880 Town is a blockbuster.

Lots of us have attics crammed full of objects that outlived their usefulness — or at least their original usefulness. We don’t discard the stuff because we’ve learned it gains another function: serving as a tangible link to our past.

Located 22 miles west of Murdo on I-90, 1880 Town is South Dakota’s attic. It’s not a crammed attic, though, thanks to its setting on the vast prairie. You gaze down Main Street to the horizon beyond, not to adjacent neighborhoods and tall fast food signs. Much of the stuff here is big: whole buildings hauled in from Quinn, Dixon, Tea, Gregory, Gettysburg, and countless other living or forgotten towns, including long-submerged Oahe Mission (under Lake Oahe).

So while the town site isn’t authentic to history, its structures are. That sets it apart from most other recreated Old West towns. You feel the authenticity in weathered wood textures, and you smell it.”These buildings stood through the big dust storms of the 1930s,” observes the town’s only year-round resident, Scott Key.”You’re probably still smelling some of that dust.”

“Visitors tell us they feel like they actually walked back in time,” says Richard Hullinger, the attraction’s co-owner.”They often add that they didn’t necessarily expect that when they stopped.”

1880 Town didn’t originate with any grand vision of authenticity. In the early 1970s a movie production company made a deal with Murdo’s Clarence Hullinger. He would supply antiques for a western scheduled to be shot in South Dakota, and the company would build an Old West main street on Hullinger family property. In the end the movie shoot fell through, but an ersatz saloon and little shop were left behind as reminders of the project, standing within view of spanking new I-90.

Scott Key, right, takes apart the Carter saloon piece by piece.

In Murdo people say plans for expanding the site, first called Two Strike after the historical Lakota leader, were sketched on restaurant napkins. That’s because Clarence and his wife, Anna Marie, owned and operated the local Teepee restaurant. And anyone who knew Clarence could have predicted the town’s expansion wasn’t going to involve construction of phony buildings as long as there were antique structures plentiful across the prairie, standing abandoned on main streets, or relegated to second lives as ranch granaries. Clarence, his granddaughter Sally Cuny says,”always has some sort of antique to show you, along with documentation, whether it’s a gun, picture, or saddle.”

Of course, bringing home a just-purchased gun or saddle is simple compared to a blacksmith shop or railroad depot. Fortunately Clarence had a partner in the venture as enthusiastic as himself: son Richard, who is Sally’s dad.

“Both of them like to have something big to work on,” says Sally.”They get excited about new ideas. For them 1880 Town has been a work in progress for more than 35 years.”

And a great business success. In 1972 Clarence and Richard committed to recreating a prairie town as it might have looked between the years 1880 and 1920. The same year Richard further developed the adjacent interstate exit by opening a service station. In 1974 the New York Times featured the fledgling attraction in a story about traveling cross-country via I-90. Today, with just Scott Key living there full time, 1880 Town draws more visitors per capita than any other South Dakota town.

Scott is an employee who, since 1979, has worn a lot of hats — historic interpreter, groundskeeper, builder, and the photographer behind 1880 Town postcards. Most significantly, he’s provided know-how, muscle, and creativity in moving most of the 30-plus historic buildings to the site. For Scott the most memorable relocation was when a two-story structure — which had served Carter as a bank, post office, and doctor’s office — was acquired in 1999. Built in 1915, it had tin siding, which was common in homestead era prairie construction. He took the building apart plank by plank.”That took a month,” Scott recalls.”Putting it back together took a year.” Each piece was photographed, and each photo numbered to guide the reassembly. The process worked so well, Scott says,”that when we put the tin back on, the nail holes matched up.”

Antique furnishings bring 1880 Town’s old-time structures to life. Longtime employee Scott Key combed the region to find the perfect props for each building.

But it was just a shell of a building with little evidence of the original interior left. That’s where Scott put his creativity to work. He installed a floor from a former church in Quinn, and an ornate pressed tin ceiling from a Winner furniture store and funeral parlor. Voila! 1880 Town’s popular Longhorn Saloon was born.

“People can get a buzz in that saloon,” Scott promises.”Of course, it’s a sugar buzz because we serve sarsaparilla.”

Over the years Scott has scouted the region for smaller antiques, too. One day at a Deadwood auction he learned some movie props were scheduled to be sold at a Rapid City garage sale. So he drove down and bought the props from a film he’d heard about, but hadn’t been released. Scott hit the jackpot. The movie, Dances with Wolves, won the 1991 Academy Award as Best Picture.

Many of those particular props match 1880 Town’s buildings in age. Just months before Scott acquired them, Cindy Costner found them in very much the same way. Kevin Costner’s wife at the time, she drove across South Dakota to auctions, second-hand stores, and old homesteads buying antiques. Their inclusion gave Dances with Wolves a feeling of authenticity.

“People learned we had Dances with Wolves stuff, and they started contacting us about things from the movie they had,” remembers Richard.”So we got more props, including two freight wagons, and we also acquired animals from the movie. The horse Kevin Costner rode, Cisco, lived here until he died last year. The two lead freight mules, Jim and Jake, are still with us.”‚Ä®

Jim and Jake are easy to spot in the movie because the wagon driver calls them just that: Jim and Jake. It’s been 20 years this summer and fall since Dances with Wolves was shot on the South Dakota prairies, and in the badlands and hills.”Still today,” notes Richard,”everything associated with the movie is quite a draw.”

Richard is proud, too, of items associated with another big name — Casey Tibbs. The late world champion rodeo cow- boy from Fort Pierre, might have been happy to know that an expensive and beautiful possession of his would eventually find a good home here.

“We’ve got a pistol of his with his name engraved on the handle,” explains Richard.”He lost it in a poker game and we have a letter documenting exactly how he lost it.”

Clarence Hullinger crafted a life size T-rex skeleton from scrap metal in 2002.

This is an attic, albeit an attic with more emphasis on documentation than most of us consider for our stuff. There’s Draper’s old hotel built in 1910, Gettysburg’s rail- road depot from 1886, and Dixon’s 1915 St. Stephen’s Church. For Sally, growing up, 1880 Town was the most incredible playground imaginable.”And now I’m seeing the same thing in my own three daughters,” she adds. Sally got her first taste of employment here in the 1990s, and she watched a sister and other relatives get married on site.”It’s been a huge part of our family’s life,” she says — for four generations.

The movie that started it all wasn’t to be, but 1880 Town caught the eye of other filmmakers and media companies over the years. A Buick commercial was filmed there, Gateway snapped still shots for a print project, and a national morning news audience watched the state’s centennial wagon train roll through 1880 Town. The Discovery Channel’s Rediscovering America program used the site, as did the Linn brothers of Rapid City for one of their early movies.

But no matter how beautifully it is photographed — and it certainly lends itself to beautiful photography — this is a place that comes fully alive in person. The feel of prairie sun and wind, sound of birds calling, and those earthy smells are central to the experience. 1880 Town opens its gates to visitors in May and the season runs through October. Not only will Scott Key have lots of visitors but, for a few months, neighbors. Some of 1880 Town’s best employees are older couples, most from out-of-state, who park their RVs at a campground a quarter mile north and settle in for a prairie summer.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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The Story Behind the Square

By Bernie Hunhoff

Rapid City’s Main Street Square is abuzz with activity at festivals held throughout the year. Photo by Destination Rapid City.

Mitzi Lally loved children, so you might imagine her dismay when she discovered that Rapid City citizens were spending $6.5 million on a new plaza to be known as Main Street Square even though there was a porn shop just down the street. The square was envisioned as a gathering place for families, yet it would be neighbors to Video Blue, a dark-windowed fixture on Main Street for more than 30 years.

Ray Hillenbrand, Mitzi’s younger brother, runs Prairie Edge Trading Company from a second story office across the street from the square. He remembers when his 80-year-old sister climbed the stairs to register her complaint.”She wasn’t happy about it, that’s for sure,” Ray said. So he called for help from Dan Tribby, his right-hand man at Prairie Edge.

Tribby hasn’t forgotten the incident, either. After all, it’s not every day that your boss orders you to go buy a porn shop.”Trib” (as he’s called by friends) balked at the idea, but before the day was out he was walking through the front door of Video Blue for the first time.

Tribby grew up in Sturgis, the son of a car dealer, so he knew how to close a deal. But a porn shop? He decided it was best not to let on that he was there for Mitzi, or even that he intended to raze the structure. As it turned out, the owner knew the plaza was coming and had already thought about selling because he saw the proverbial”writing on the wall.” All it took was $300,000.

Enthusiastic proponents of Main Street Square included (from left) Dan Senftner, Ray Hillenbrand and Dan Tribby.

Buying property is sometimes like eating potato chips. You can’t stop. Hillenbrand and his family soon purchased four neighboring buildings at a total cost of nearly $5 million, because they thought that the other stores — while not offensive — were not the right mix for the square.

The Hillenbrands and Tribby restored the buildings, and went to great lengths attracting the perfect entrepreneurs.”We probably had 80 or 90 applicants for the 18 shops,” Tribby says.”We studied each and every one of them. We decided we didn’t want franchises. We thought we had enough local talent.”

“We found that they were wonderful people with good ideas, and we wanted them to be a team,” Hillenbrand says.”We told each of them that the idea wasn’t for us to make money but for them to add something to the community.”

So as Main Street Square opened to the constant laughter of children playing in splashing fountains, the shops began opening — a gift shop, bakery, coffee house, outdoor store, pub, ice cream parlor, several eateries and, of course, a toy store.

South Dakota’s towns and cities share a modest prairie sameness. Those with more people have more parks and pretty buildings, but big or small they can usually be described as functionalism guarded by square blocks of square houses, all inhabited by easy-to-please citizenries that don’t expect much more of their municipalities than to plow and police the streets.

Families enjoy hot cocoa and free skating on an ice rink larger than the frozen pond at Rockefeller Center in New York City.

Rapid City is audaciously abandoning such humble expectations. It wants to become one of those rare cities in America that people seek out not just to ski or fish or see a nearby mountain but to see the city itself.

Most such destination cities — Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles — are larger than Rapid City, population 70,000. And none likely had more humble origins.

Rapid City began as nothing more than a supply center for miners in the 1870s. Called Hay Camp at the outset, it was eventually named for the pristine creek that ripples through town. Framed by the Black Hills to the west and small grass prairie to the east, the town had rough beginnings.

In June 1877, just after the city was founded, two horse thieves were apprehended. Red Curry and Doc Allen didn’t argue their innocence, but they were adamant that a teenager traveling with them was not guilty. They said the 18-year-old was afoot when they found him, so they offered to let him ride one of their two spare horses.

Unfortunately, a gang of 15 or 20 vigilantes from Rapid City didn’t believe them or didn’t care. They hanged all three, and badly; it was later discovered that they didn’t know how to tie a hangman’s knot or judge the distance correctly. The fall didn’t break their necks. Their feet barely scraped the ground, so they slowly strangled to death.

Some of the young city’s most reputable citizens either participated or looked the other way as the hangings proceeded on a mountain overlooking the town that’s still called Hangman’s Hill. Robert Casey, a writer who moved to town 30 years after the incident, once said,”You could get yourself thoroughly disliked by discussing the affair.” One fellow who insisted on an investigation was eventually committed to the mental hospital in Yankton.

Some pioneers shared the thought that the town wouldn’t grow until all who took part in”the Hangman’s Hill business” were dead, and the city did grow slowly. It had a population of just 14,000 in 1942, but that changed when the U.S. Air Force opened a training base for B-17 pilots and bombardiers a few miles east of town. More than 4,000 soldiers and staff arrived, and Rapid City has been on a growth trajectory ever since.

A serious setback came in 1972 when a heavy June rain flooded Rapid Creek, destroying or damaging 2,700 homes and killing 238 people. The aftermath of the flood led to growth; the waterway became a greenway that soon filled with parks and public improvements.

Thursday night festivals featuring food, music and art have become a summertime tradition in downtown Rapid City.

Historic restorations of downtown buildings began in the 1980s. The six-story Alex Johnson Hotel, built the year Gutzon Borglum arrived to carve Mount Rushmore, led the way. The Buell Building, the Prairie Edge Trading Company and other century-old brick commercial structures have also been given new life. The most modern downtown addition is the impressive Journey Museum, built in the flood’s path in 1997. Still, a small group of community leaders believed the town was too much like every other place — square houses, good streets and all that sameness.

“There’s an old saying that you don’t have a town if you don’t have a heart,” says Ray Hillenbrand, as we trudged up those same steep wood stairs of Prairie Edge. In 2006, he and some fellow downtown storeowners developed an ambitious plan to make the city a destination city. They proposed a Business Improvement District to provide part of the funding, and it passed with 60 percent of the vote in 2008. They sought local contributions from businesses big and small, and converted a very average 68-car parking lot into a place called the Main Street Square, an oval green spot with fountains where children frolic in the summer and tourists and downtown workers enjoy outdoor lunches. Thursday nights in summer have already become a tradition. Families gather for children’s activities and free concerts. An area is also cordoned off for beer drinkers.

The square remains a work in progress. Renowned artist Masayuki Nagase, who was educated in Tokyo and now lives in California, plans to sculpt 21 tall granite spires that will encircle the plaza. Nagase says his designs will honor the timeless elements of wind and water that have shaped the Badlands and Black Hills.

Visitors are likely to see Nagase and his local apprentices hand-chiseling the granite as children play in the nearby fountains. His preference for interaction with Rapid Citians was one reason why he emerged from a field of 88 applicants to win the $2 million commission.

Welcoming outsiders — even a Japanese-born artist — to take leadership roles might be one area where Rapid City differs from many other prairie places. Hillenbrand is an Indiana native who came to the city in 1980 to buy a Hermosa buffalo ranch and, a few years later, Prairie Edge. Tribby grew up in nearby Sturgis, but he left the state at age 17 to join the Marine Corps. He lived in New Mexico and ranched in Oregon before coming back to work at Prairie Edge, where he started out as the guy who boiled buffalo skulls so artists could paint designs on them. He became general manager in 1997.

The state tourism department’s presidential mascots, representing the faces at Mount Rushmore, occasionally visit the Square.

Perhaps it’s because of the constant stream of mountain tourists, or the newcomers who serve at Ellsworth Air Force Base. Rapid City may not be a perfect place, but provincialism doesn’t appear to be one of its sins.

Rapid City leaders new and old admit they’re surprised at the early success of the Main Street Square. In just two years, it has become a daily gathering place for locals and travelers. But Hillenbrand is a pragmatist.”We haven’t proven anything yet,” he says.”It has to be sustainable for the community and it can’t stop with just the square. It has to connect all of the city.”

He and others hope the next step is a Memorial Park promenade, a 40-foot wide boulevard of trees and pathways from Main Street to the Rushmore Plaza Civic Center. The local Vucurevich Foundation has given $1 million to further that idea. Local leaders also want to connect downtown with the 2,100-student South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

Leading the ambitious plans is Destination Rapid City, an organization that started in 2008 by the business community to re-invigorate the city’s downtown district. Hillenbrand is chairman of the DRC board, and the hands-on leader is Dan Senftner, who grew up on a farm 17 miles from the small northeast South Dakota town of Herreid. His earliest retail experience came every August,”when mom loaded us in a car and took us to Aberdeen to buy school clothes.”

Senftner started a music store in downtown Rapid City as a young man and operated it for 25 years. He also gained experience as a developer of historic commercial property. Along the way, the farm kid developed a keen sense for urban community.”I believe every community can benefit from having a focal point in their downtown corridor,” he says. When he first came to Rapid City, the downtown district featured horse and carriage rides.”There was still a Newberry’s five-and-dime store, and the moms and dads and kids all came downtown.”

He says the square and the accompanying developments and restorations seem to be reviving that atmosphere. Tribby agrees.”I think we were romanticizing the whole idea when we were selling it, and now it looks like we weren’t exaggerating because it is coming true even more than we could have hoped.”

Children delight in the Square’s interactive fountain, where water dances in patterns. Evening light shows are also staged.

But their senior partner, Hillenbrand, isn’t satisfied.”We still have to make it a success,” he says.”We have to make it sustainable for the community and for the store owners.”

However, entrepreneurs in the new Shops at Main Street Square development and at nearby restaurants and stores that previously existed, say the plaza has already made a significant difference in their revenues.

Just as the plaza was being finished, Borders Books filed for bankruptcy and closed more than 200 stores in the United States, including its Rapid City location. That prompted Hillenbrand and his sister, Mitzi, to build a new bookstore where Video Blue once stood. It’s a handsome building with big, welcoming windows. A bright, colorful corner is reserved for children, and there’s a story time every Tuesday morning.

Mitzi died in August 2011, just before the store opened. But the name of the store is Mitzi’s Books, and her smiling face is on the logo. Neither she nor her gentle but firm prodding for change will soon be forgotten.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the March/April 2013 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.