Remaining Ranchland

By Paul Higbee

Johanna Meier Della Vecchia (left) points to trails she rode with her friend, Rosalie Aslesen, on Oak Hills Ranch.

Johanna Meier Della Vecchia stood by the gate at one of Spearfish’s last ranches and looked out over the grasslands bordered by big patches of oak and pine. She traveled the globe as one of the top sopranos in the world of opera, and then came back to Spearfish — hoping her hometown could avoid some of the troubles she observed elsewhere.

“So many beautiful places are completely developed,” she says. “Wide open areas like this have been lost forever.”

Standing with her at the ranch gate was longtime friend Rosalie Aslesen. The two talked of riding their horses on the ranch, exploring the hills for hours and sometimes pondering what might become of the natural splendor.

When the two were children, Spearfish’s population was only about 2,500. Small farms and ranches still surrounded the town. Today, Spearfish ranks among the fastest growing communities on the Great Plains, and most of the agricultural land has been subdivided into ranchettes, commercial developments, hotels and golf courses.

Johanna and her late husband Guido Della Vecchia, who was also an opera singer, bought the 800-acre site years ago. Now she is working with the South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust to create a conservation easement so that it will continue as ranchland. When she made the announcement at a media event in 2022, a young reporter asked, “How long does perpetuity last?”

She still smiles at the question because she relishes the answer: forever, of course. The young man’s issue might have been as much about disbelief as vocabulary. It is difficult to grasp that a piece of land this spectacular will look and function just as it does now in a century, given the appetite for Black Hills real estate.

Lone Tree Hill is the name given to one of the highest points on Oak Hills Ranch.

However, the benefits go beyond just the scenery of cattle grazing on meadows and seeking shade under the oak trees. The ranch, which sits southwest of town on a high plateau, is a clean watershed for the community and home to deer, elk, wild turkeys, coyotes, mountain lions, eagles and rare pine martens. Black bears occasionally traverse the ranch, using it as a corridor between the Hills and surrounding plains. Photographs capture the ranch’s beauty, but no description is complete without mention of its scents: pines, grasses lush or dry, wild raspberries and the aroma of thunderstorms approaching from Wyoming.

“This is the land where I rode as a child, beginning with my Shetland pony and then full-size horses,” Johanna recalls. “Frank Thomson owned the land then and he knew I’d stay on the trails and close the gates.”

Johanna’s parents had moved to Spearfish in 1939 to start the Black Hills Passion Play. Her father, Josef Meier, built an outdoor amphitheater near the Thomson ranch. Meier loved South Dakota life, and he developed a herd of Hereford cattle. Johanna helped with the Passion Play even as she established herself as a major figure in 20th century opera. Best known as a Wagnerian soprano, she sang roles at the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Opera and on storied European stages. Wherever performances took her, Johanna’s thoughts were seldom far removed from the Black Hills.

“I’m grateful for the career I had, and I loved it,” she says. “But I spent 37 years living in hotels and airports.” She and her husband always knew they would retire to the Black Hills. Johanna also knew her father had offered to buy Thomson’s land. But Thomson, who lived into his 90s, loved the land and showed little interest in selling.

When he died in 1975, a Spearfish friend called Johanna and told her she believed Thomson’s son, George, would sell the property if Johanna could fly home quickly and close the deal. Johanna was performing abroad, and the couple lived in New Jersey with retirement still a long way off. Still, they jumped at the opportunity. Johanna arranged for a fast South Dakota trip and acquired a property documented as a piece of micro-history like few others in South Dakota.

Frank Thomson lived a simple life on the ranch. His house, which still stands, was little more than a small barn. But he was respected by his fellow ranchers, and he served as president of the local cattlemen’s association for 52 years. He grew oats, wheat, barley and corn along with his beef cattle, and gardened for his family of five. He also harvested timber (it’s likely that what Johanna knew as horse trails were developed as lumber roads) and established himself as a noted historian and author. Whatever work Thomson did by day, it often figured into his writing at night. He described birds, including solitary thrushes, “that gave a peep-peep-peep, each peep being a single note after a short pause … the plaintive notes could be heard on clear, still nights, and they would carry your soul somewhere.”

Ranch manager Mark Weber (second from left) appreciates the history, heritage and natural environment at Oak Hills Ranch. His family includes (from left) grandson Oakley, wife Terri and daughter and son-in-law Cindy and Christian Raby.

Thomson marveled at the mountain air that seemed to magnify distant objects and kept Venus visible on bright days. “Such is the climate; the birds; and the sky that holds men to this enchanted land,” he wrote.

The ranch felt less enchanting through the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s. Thomson wrote of clouds of grasshoppers, and he also observed clouds of windswept topsoil, both of which nearly obliterated the sun. “I stood and saw my field of winter wheat of seventy-eight acres, top soil and seed wheat, being lifted by a strong west wind and carried high over Lookout Mountain that towers eight-hundred feet above the city of Spearfish,” Thomson wrote. The date was April 24, 1937. To his great credit, Thomson worked to rehabilitate his land in the coming decades.

He did it well. Rosalie Aslesen first experienced the ranch nearly 50 years after that vicious wind of ’37 and found it breathtaking. In school, she and Johanna knew one another, and they shared a love of horses though they had never ridden together. At a Spearfish High School reunion in the 1980s, Johanna asked Rosalie if she still rode. Rosalie said yes but added that she didn’t then own a horse. “I’ve got horses,” Johanna said, and suggested a ride together through her recently acquired Oak Hills Ranch. It marked the beginning of nearly 20 years of trail riding for the two friends. “I remember wildflowers in summer, fall colors, views from the high points, and staying cool on hot days riding in Hungry Hollow,” Rosalie says. “They were unbelievable rides, and we could take many without repeating one.”

Spearfish rancher and conservationist Karl Jensen (pictured in the doorway of the Thomsons' now-dilapidated ranch house) believes easements are an important tool for the agriculture community.

Frank Thomson, like most South Dakota farmers, never named his land. Johanna and Guido called it Oak Hills. Some Black Hills neighbors said they liked the sound of it but wondered if it was a misnomer. Looking at hills leading up to the ranch, pines dominate. “But there are oaks, beautiful oaks,” Rosalie affirms. “From the ranch buildings you look over the oaks and see the pines below.”

Some days, Rosalie and Johanna packed picnic lunches for their rides, or they relaxed over dinner with their husbands back at the ranch cabin. In their discussions, Rosalie could tell how committed her friend was in finding a way to preserve Oak Hills Ranch forever from the encroaching concrete of civilization. Johanna considered national organizations, but she chose the South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust because it reflects the state’s values of keeping agriculture strong and respecting landowner rights.

“Johanna had an incredible opera career, and she did something incredible, too, in coming home to South Dakota and conserving land that would have been worth millions had she decided to sell to housing developers,” says Tony Leif, the Land Trust executive director. “It’s really humbling that she put her trust in our organization. It’s helping us to be seen as an entity that can and will get these things done.”

The South Dakota Agricultural Land Trust was incorporated in 2019. Leif says it is currently working with about 50 landowners interested in establishing conservation easements for properties ranging from 30 or 40 acres to 13,000. “We never contact landowners and solicit easements,” Leif says. “They have to make the first contact.”

Johanna appreciates how much latitude she had in structuring her easement, even the option of keeping some land open to development. “But for me,” she stresses, “it means absolutely no development whatever. People in the Black Hills are so accustomed to open space and natural beauty that they may think one more piece of development won’t hurt. But it’s easy to get caught up in the sweep of concrete, and when a piece of land is gone, it’s gone forever.”

Mark Weber, whom Johanna selected as ranch manager, shares that view and the belief that as a working ranch the property must limit public access. A former law enforcement officer for 37 years with Lawrence County and then the City of Spearfish, Weber knows how to handle trespassers. Increasingly, trespassers with no connection to ag lands pose threats to both livestock and themselves. Weber says there are plenty of public lands near Spearfish, including the national forest and Spearfish Canyon.

The public can get a closeup look at Oak Hills, however, by hiking the city’s historic Thoen Stone Trail, which stops just short of the ranch. The Thoen Stone is a controversial bit of local history that possibly dates back to gold miners who were there in 1833. Ezra Kind, the last of the ill-fated miners, reportedly scratched the story of their misadventure on a sandstone slab found across the valley. Frank Thomson believed in the stone and defended its authenticity throughout his long life. The short trail can be found at the end of St. Joe Street in southwest Spearfish, and Oak Hills Ranch stretches west of the trail’s end.

Corrals at the ranch feature stone walls built by the Thomsons.

Weber appreciates the history, heritage and natural environment of the ranch. “I love this place and it feels like I’ve gone full circle with it,” he says. He grew up in Spearfish and at age 9 earned “a nickel a bale” loading hay for the Thomsons. As a teenager, Weber sometimes spent nights during calving season on the ranch. His wife’s grandfather, Bud Sprigler, helped Thomson rehabilitate the land after the Dust Bowl, terracing fields with just a blade and horses for better water retention.

“But I didn’t really understand the ranch until recent years,” Weber says. “How it’s a watershed, how important healthy grass is, how the shape of cattle hooves aerates the soil. You hear some people gripe about farmers and ranchers, but there’s lots of land that wouldn’t have survived like this without them.”

Of course, nature contributed what can be seen as ranch amenities today, long before humans knew the Black Hills. It is bordered by two steep canyons, Fish Hatchery Gulch and Hungry Hollow, about a mile-and-a-half apart and forming a natural barrier to livestock movement.

South Dakotans who respect the importance of maintaining farmland can rest assured, along with Johanna Meier Della Vecchia, that these unique 800 acres will be part of South Dakota’s agricultural culture for perpetuity. However, even strangers to the state’s farm culture will benefit.

“Travelers on I-90 can see the ranch a couple miles off, turning into town at Exit 12 at Spearfish,” Leif says. “It’s the green plateau straight ahead. Everybody gets that view forever.”

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