Our May/June issue includes a feature on Lake Poinsett, where well-known photographer Greg Latza and his family are the newest residents of a lake community that has attracted people to its shore for centuries. Latza sent us several beautiful photos taken the last few summers. We couldn’t use them all, so here are some that didn’t make the magazine.
Editor’s Note: A lot has changed since we first wrote about Kones Korner. The old store has been replaced with a new, more modern building. Curt Carter, the friendly proprietor we met, passed away in 1996. Today his son Vic operates the business, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year. And even though you won’t find gas for $1.22 a gallon, much about Kones Korner has remained the same. Here’s what we found on the day we stopped in the summer of 1985.
Driving by on U.S. Highway 81, Kones Korner looks like a lot of other country gas stations, except for the bear trap on the roof.
Black hens peck peacefully at the gravel in the parking lot. Red letters advertise regular gas for $1.22. An aluminum-sided ice machine struggles to stay cool in the summer sun.
Even when you first enter the station, it appears generic. There’s a cooler of milk and pop. A cardboard sign advertises eggs, manufactured fresh daily by the hens outside. Hiland Potato Chip bags, in a rainbow of colors, fill a rack by the door. All the name-brand candy bars are in rows on the counter. A few beer signs and auction posters round out the decor.
That’s the front room. Step past the auction posters and the Castlewood girls basketball schedule to your right and Kones Korner takes on a new dimension; suddenly you see guns hanging on the walls, guns standing in racks, guns lying in display cases — more guns than you’ve likely ever seen within four walls.
Housed in this unpretentious exterior is South Dakota’s biggest gun shop. Owner Curt Carter says he usually has 1,000 guns on hand, including new and used. He sells and trades up to 2,000 guns a year.
A lifelong sportsman, Carter was born on a farm south of Castlewood. “Granddad was a homesteader here. In fact, he’s buried on a plot of ground on the homestead. We don’t even know where exactly. ” Curt’s father was an avid sportsman — one of the early Black Hills hunters — and he taught his son how to handle a gun. “I grew up with a gun my hand,” he says. Ever since his youth, he has enjoyed hunting pheasant, deer, waterfowl and other game.
He farmed as a young man in the Castlewood area before he and his wife, Vi, bought Kones Korner from an uncle in 1964. Back then, the station was a typical “pop, gas and beer” stop on the highway.
“I had a few used guns I’d got at a sale and I took them to the station to see if I could sell them,” he recalls. “When they were gone, people asked me if I was going to get more guns.”
Always anxious to oblige, he got a few more.
“It just didn’t take a long time,” he says. “In three or four years, we had a couple hundred guns. In 1969, we built on a new gunroom and expanded to about 500 guns. In 1974, we added another gunroom and now we carry a thousand guns continually.”
A few big gun stores in the Midwest may carry that many guns, but they probably have a dozen or more of each type, and very few used guns. Nowhere in the region are hunters likely to find the variety of rifles, shotguns and handguns, new and used, that are on display in this modest country store 10 miles south of Watertown.
If Kones Korner is the premier gun shop in the state, then its proprietor must be the premier gun dealer. He doesn’t fit Dale Carnegie’s description of a top salesman. Yet his soft-spoken manner, rural wit and Dakota-western garb seem to be just what it takes to move firearms.
“Are you finding something?” he asks a young man who is browsing through the gunroom with a toddler in tow. “I’ll trade you a gun for that nice little boy you got there … he could help me pump gas!”
The little boy looks up with a start and the young father grins.
Another customer, stopping for a half-gallon carton of Lakeside milk, asks if the weather will be “fit to combine” that afternoon. “Somewhere it might be,” replied Curt. He has a good word for all who enter, including both the locals who buy milk and beer and fuel, or the visitors from afar who come to see the guns.
Equally friendly are two large, black German short hairs that roam the shop, Joe and Speck. “Joe is the best young dog we’ve come up with,” says Curt matter-of-factly. Speck doesn’t seem offended. Curt and his wife live in the back of the store. They raise chickens and ducks and cats and a female coon named Jim.
“Jim gets along with the cats. She’s the boss, I tell you!” laughed Curt. Time to sell sweet corn Vi Carter helps with the store but refuses to get too involved with the guns. Their son, Vic, has been associated with the store for the past 10 years. They also have two daughters and five grandchildren.
Even though the guns have given Kones Korner a big-time reputation, the Carters still provide the service you might expect of a small-town store. They sell a local farm boy’s sweet corn for $1 a dozen. Tacked up with farm auction posters and the girls basketball schedule are other community announcements, including a notice that Senator Jim Abdnor will speak in the area.
In fact, that down-home touch lends an atmosphere to the establishment that the gun counter of K-mart could never copy. (The Carters wouldn’t consider it “marketing,” but the antlers nailed to the roof alongside the bear trap also add to the mystique) .
The only fixture that looks out of place is a bright red video machine; but even it has been adapted to fit the environment. It is home to a bumper sticker that reads BERNHARD GOETZ: AMERICAN HERO.
Carter says his business doesn’t change much from year to year. “We’re in shotgun country here, and my shotgun business is tremendous. We’re on the edge of real good bird country.” He said goose hunting was suffering for a few years, “but it came back last fall.” Numerous marshes, ponds and lakes in the region create ideal duck conditions, and the pheasant population seems to be improving. But local hunting conditions don’t affect his gun trade. Customers come from a radius of 250 miles around. Most arrive in the months of September, October and November — a 90-day spell when he will sell half of his guns for the year. An Alaskan who comes to northeast South Dakota annually to hunt pheasants always buys his shells from the Carters.
“It used to be you’d wake up in the mornings and you’d wonder where the people would come from to buy the guns,” Carter said, confessing to an affliction that strikes many small businessmen. “But it seemed the more guns I gathered in, the more people would come.”
Carter, a self-confessed wheeler-dealer, says he enjoys dealing with the vast majority of hunters. He even admits to a streak of “wheeler-dealer-ism” and has been known to shake dice for a gun. “I don’t like to do that, though,” he says. “It’s too hard on my nerves.” (However, he is always ready to shake for a pop or a beer.) He sells guns for prices ranging from $50 to $1,500 and says he operates on about a 10 percent markup on new guns. In fact, he says he sells the new firearms for about wholesale price to cash customers and makes his only profit from a 10 percent discount allowed by the wholesalers for paying promptly. He and his son check over all used guns before re-selling them. “We stand back of them,” he said. “Most people are very understanding if there is a problem. We give them their money back, or put it toward another gun.” The Carters are active members of the Dakota Territory Gun Collectors Association. They regularly exhibit their stock at the 10 shows held each year by the group. Along with his inventory of new and used guns, Carter has acquired a collection of antique Colt handguns and Winchester rifles dating back to the 1850s.
The hours are long. Kones Korner is open 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. daily except Sundays, when “I sleep in until 8 a.m.” But they still find time for hunting trips and an occasional country-western concert.
At age 57, Curt Carter is content with life as it is at Kones Korner. “I’ll continue just as long as the good Lord will let me.”
This story is edited from the September 1985 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.
This weekend, many South Dakotans will honor a very special holy man. But his fame is limited — you won’t find him in Butler’s Lives of the Saints or any other hagiography, and the Vatican doesn’t claim him. His accomplishments are limited to ridding one little European country of an animal plague. Of course we’re referring to St. Urho of Finland.
Urho’s a manufactured saint — Minnesota Finns dreamt him up in the 1950s to show up the Irish and their Saint Patrick. Their legend states that St. Urho was a hardy fellow, a voracious eater of kalla mojakka (fish head soup) and sour buttermilk. When Finland’s grape crop was threatened by grasshoppers, Urho saved the day. He banished the pests with a simple chant,”Hein‰sirkka, hein‰sirkka, mene t‰‰lt‰ hiiteen.” (Non-Finnish readers, that’s”Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to hell.”) The insects obeyed, the grapes were saved, and wine flowed for everyone.
Phony or not, Finnish Americans embraced the saint. Now St. Urho’s Day celebrations occur all over the country each March 16, incorporating fun, Finnish foods, and St. Urho’s official colors, Nile green and royal purple.
If you would like to participate in St. Urho’s Day festivities here in South Dakota, you’ve got two options this Saturday. Lake Norden will hold their annual parade at 11 am on Main Avenue. It’s followed by a potluck and a special program at the Community Center. Frederick, South Dakota also observes St. Urho’s Day with Finnish foods like mojakka (beef soup), lihapiirakat (meat pies) and Finn bread. There’ll also be a wine tasting exchange, where participants of drinking age bring a favorite bottle of wine for others to sample. Join in the fun at Frederick’s Community Center from 6-8 pm.
This recipe comes to us via Heidi Marttila-Losure, a Frederick native and the editor and project administrator of Dakotafire Media, a journalism project that focuses on the rural issues facing the James River watershed area of North and South Dakota. Marttilla-Losure told us the secret of making mojakka: “Do not use flour when you brown the meat. Just brown it in butter. If you use flour, you might make a fine soup, but it won’t be mojakka. The clear broth and the rutabaga are its key characteristics.”
1 1/2 to 2 pounds beef stew meat
2 tablespoons butter
6 cups water, broth or a combination
1 medium onion, chopped
2 teaspoons whole allspice
6 medium potatoes, peeled and chopped
2 carrots, peeled and thinly sliced
1 large rutabaga, peeled and chopped
1 teaspoon salt
Brown meat in butter. Place meat in stock pot with water, onion and allspice. Bring to a simmer. Stir in the potatoes, carrots, rutabaga and salt. Replace lid and simmer on medium-low until vegetables are tender, about 30 minutes.
Some variations on this recipe include adding garlic, bay leaves or celery.
I never attended a wedding, funeral or a single Sunday service in Garfield Lutheran Church, but I always sort of considered it to be our church. I’ve never heard many stories of its early years, but I always assumed the Andrews family, who came from Norway and homesteaded southwest of Lake Norden in 1882, played a part in forming the congregation in 1884 and in constructing the church in 1901.
Sadly I never knew much about the church until recently reading that it has been added to the National Register of Historic Places. Immigrant families like my great-grandparents conducted Norwegian language services in a schoolhouse in Garfield Township until 1889. By then, the congregation boasted nearly 60 families who decided it was time to build a proper church.
They found a spot almost halfway between Bryant and Lake Norden. After years of planning and fundraising, volunteer members of the congregation started work in 1900. Men dug huge stones from nearby fields and brought them to the site aboard wagons to be used in the foundation. One congregant created a metal weathervane inscribed with 1901, the year of the church’s completion, and placed it on the steeple.
The interior remained incomplete until 1913, when the pews, pulpit, altar and altar rail were added. Step inside and you’ll still see these original furnishings.
When the church closed in 1978, its leaders faced the daunting task of deciding what to do with its most important possessions. One day, one of the church ladies came to see my aunt, and she had Garfield’s intricately sewn altar cloth with her.”We figured you would want this,” she told my aunt. Puzzled, she asked why.
“Because your mother made it,” the lady replied.
That was news to everyone. Grandma Andrews always had some sort of fancywork going — knitting, crocheting or Norwegian hardanger — and never really said much about any of her creations unless prodded. As it happens, my dad and his 11 siblings attended that church all their lives, probably gazed upon the altar cloth hundreds of Sundays, not knowing it was their mother’s work.
The altar cloth has become a treasured family possession that we use on special occasions. I last saw it atop Grandma’s sea-foam green casket at her funeral in 2003. It serves as a connection to our matriarch and the little prairie church that was so important to our family and dozens of others in Hamlin County.
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| Carroll Hardy of Sturgis was one of South Dakota’s noteworthy athletes. |
This week I got my registration form for the annual history conference in Pierre. I’ve never attended, but this year’s focus on our sports history looks especially interesting. Conferences like these love to focus on the political or economic aspects of our history, which are important. But cultural and social components like athletics are just as important, and sometimes overlooked.
One of the speakers is Mel Antonen, who grew up across the street from the baseball field in Lake Norden and became a national baseball writer. He’s going to talk about how baseball games in Yankee Stadium and South Dakota are alike. I’ve heard the presentation before, and it’s well worth hearing again. Not to steal his thunder, but he’ll probably tell the story of covering Cal Ripken when he was going through contract negotiations in Baltimore. He ultimately decided to stay with the Orioles, and when Antonen asked why he turned down more money and bigger markets, Ripken said,”Mel, you just don’t understand baseball in a small town.”
South Dakota has a rich sports tradition. A few years back we asked longtime Yankton sports writer Hod Nielsen to compile a list of 12 of our greatest athletes. That’s not to be read,”the 12 greatest athletes in South Dakota history.” It’s simply a list of impressive athletes that Nielsen saw during his decades of work for the Yankton Press & Dakotan.
He chose all-time greats like Billy Mills, the Pine Ridge native who won the 10,000-meter race at the 1964 Olympics.”Smokey Joe” Mendel briefly held the world record in the 100-meter-dash when he ran it in 9.5 seconds as a senior at Yankton College. Sturgis native Carroll Hardy made an impact on professional football, but he’s probably best known as the only man ever to pinch-hit for the great Ted Williams.
And South Dakota’s athletes continue to make history this week. The University of South Dakota women’s basketball team is in the WNIT for the first time. They welcome Drake to the DakotaDome in Vermillion Thursday at 7 p.m. Also Thursday, South Dakota State University’s men’s team makes its first ever appearance in the NCAA tournament. The Jacks play Baylor at 6:30 p.m., on truTV. And SDSU’s women, in the tournament for the fourth consecutive year, play Purdue Saturday at 12:30.
If you’re near a television or radio, watch and listen. You might hear names we’ll be talking about 50 years from now at another history conference.
Tomorrow your homes will be filled with Thanksgiving smells: turkey roasting, gravy simmering, pies baking. You probably bought your Butterball at the grocery store weeks ago, but when I was a kid I don’t think we ever purchased a bird until we’d played turkey bingo.
We briefly discussed turkey bingo, more commonly known as a”poultry party,” a few weeks ago during an office meeting. Some staff members responded with quizzical looks.”You used to play bingo for meat?” their incredulous faces seemed to shout across the table. Well, yes I did. In fact I remember the old Lake Norden VFW Hall being packed to the gills with townspeople every fall for our annual poultry party. Young and old alike braved the pre-winter chill for one of our town’s most anticipated traditions. It was a good night if you went home with a couple of turkeys and maybe a chicken or a ham.
Apparently the idea of poultry parties is unique to the Glacial Lakes region, which is my home country. We think of South Dakota as being a unique place within America, but there are also distinct cultural pockets within our borders. Each has its own food, terminology, activities and traditions. I’d never heard of”taverns” until I moved south. Back home, they were always barbecues. And earlier this fall my grandmother requested a recipe for kuchen, a dessert she’s never made and rarely, if ever, sampled. That’s probably what makes South Dakota so special.
For those unfamiliar with a small-town poultry party, it went like this: Each game cost you a quarter a card, so during the day you’d head uptown to the bank and get a roll of quarters. You needn’t worry about supper, because the VFW Auxiliary always had barbecues (not taverns), pie and coffee. You’d grab a card or two, our local veterans would circle the building sliding quarters off the old wooden tables and into their apron pockets, and Morley Hauschildt’s booming voice would start calling the numbers. There was always good natured grumbling and gentle ribbing when someone shouted”Bingo!”:”I know where I’m going for supper Saturday night,” or”You can’t carry that many turkeys home. I’ll take one.” Sometimes we played late into the night, and the blue haze of cigarette smoke grew thicker as it hung in the air.
Of course some years we left the VFW Hall empty handed. Somehow, I don’t recall it ever being a disappointment. Still, that bite of turkey on Thanksgiving Day tasted just a little better knowing you’d won it fair and square.
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| Five generations of Hansons have enjoyed a cabin at Lake Poinsett – including (from right) Jeff Hanson, his daughter Katie, his mother, Elaine, and his granddaughter Hannah. |
For centuries, Lake Poinsett, one of South Dakota’s largest natural lakes, has been a popular stop for visitors attracted by its beauty and its bounty.
Called”the lake of the prickly pears” by early-day visitors wary of the profuse cactus on its shores, it became Poinsett in 1838 to honor then Secretary of War Joel R. Poinsett, also known as the man who brought the Poinsettia plant to the U.S. from Mexico.
Stone and bone artifacts found along Poinsett’s shore and in nearby fields indicate the lake was a popular camping and hunting ground for over 13,000 years. Today it remains a captivating place for residents, visitors, campers, fishermen and hunters. On warm summer weekends, Lake Poinsett’s population may exceed four or five thousand, more than any community within 20 miles.
The deepest of Lake Poinsett’s sprawling 8,000 acres are 16 feet. It holds about 2.5 billion gallons of water, enough to provide wiggle room aplenty for game fish. The lake is one of the state’s largest natural bodies of water, competing for bragging rights with Waubay Lake and Lake Thompson. No one really knows which is largest because sizes vary with the weather.
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| Harlan Olson (shown with his great-grandfather’s skis from Norway) has a collection of artifacts and antiques that were used or found near the lake. |
Most of the lake’s long history can be read from artifacts left by nomads, fur traders and homesteaders. Harlan Olson, a life-long lake resident born on a farm nestled against the lake’s south shore, has been harvesting the lake’s rich history for most of his 70 years.
Olson, a born raconteur and skilled writer, is the lake’s unofficial historian. He’s always had a knack for artifact hunting. Working his father’s fields as a boy, he was constantly spotting something of interest. He has been”hunting” ever since.
His impressive collection is in a museum at Lake Poinsett State Park. Tacked on to the park’s entry-information office, the museum was built in 2007 by the state Game, Fish & Parks Department. The Lake Poinsett Area Development Association donated $15,000, and more in sweat equity, to the museum. Over 2,500 people from 33 states and seven foreign countries visited last summer. As a volunteer museum guide, Olson uses the artifacts he finds as the commas and question marks to punctuate his narration about the lake through the centuries.
He begins with accounts of early nomadic lake visitors. He then segues to the Olson clan of homesteaders. Both nomads and Norwegians of a later time were all drawn to the region for many of the same reasons their fellow travelers migrate there today.
“It’s a Garden of Eden for amateur archeologists like me,” the soft-spoken Olson says.”I can visualize the life that was here thousands of years ago.”
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| Arrowheads from Olson’s collection. |
While the stone and bone objects illustrate time’s distant chapters, more recent Lake Poinsett eras are represented by rusted rifle barrels, a gnarled cavalry spur bent useless by some long ago force, colorful trading beads and other objects lost in the swirling dust of the fur trading days and the hardscrabble times of Dakota Territorial settlement.
Visiting the museum is an interactive, hands-on experience. Visitors can handle stone weapons and tools, heft a mammoth leg bone or gently poke around in a bin of sand in which Olson has buried an array of objects such as authentic Native American arrowheads.
Museum visitors can also participate in Olson’s woolly mammoth spear-throwing challenge. He hauls a mammoth-like target around in his pickup truck (it isn’t nearly as large or as fearsome as the real thing that once tramped and trumpeted through the area). He also crafted an atlatl, a type of sling used by mammoth hunters for greater spear-throwing leverage. Both skill and luck are necessary for a kill, even on Olson’s inert model. He awards few success certificates each season. Olson jokes that the state requires no mammoth license.
Lake Poinsett’s timbered shores have always been inviting habitat for waterfowl and wildlife, although the elk herd reported at the lake in an 1882 story in the Brookings Press may have been the area’s last. The October 1885 issue reported that L. C. Dewing, S. Lyon, C. W. Collier and a Mr. Ripley returned to Brookings from a successful hunt on Lake Poinsett with 205 ducks and prairie chickens.
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| Revelers enjoy lake camaraderie at the Arlington Beach Resort. |
Poinsett and seven nearby feeder lakes were scooped out by the grinding underside of a ponderous glacier thousands of years ago. Those feeder lakes have remained full the past two years, and Lake Poinsett residents have dealt with flooding.
Connected to Lake Poinsett on the north is another body of water with the oxymoronic title of Dry Lake. It is located at the Stone Bridge on Highway 28, although the historic 1883 stone crossing has been replaced by stressed concrete trusses. Charley and Ida Nitteberg’s renowned Stone Bridge Resort opened nearby in 1906, and the Lakeview Casino dance hall moved to the site later. The dance hall was a cool haven for visitors who danced to the music of Big Tiny Little, Lawrence Welk and other big bands.
The resort, later operated by Nitteberg’s children, had a fleet of 50 wooden rowboats for rent. Its 15 small cabins were booked every summer and even into the fall months, when visiting hunters headquartered at the lake. It’s all gone now, but the stories linger and Stone Bridge remains synonymous with the Nitteberg family.
To the west of Lake Poinsett is Lake Albert, located opposite a wide isthmus. As Poinsett’s few remaining lake frontages are being claimed, Lake Albert’s shoreline is experiencing increased development. This lake was named to honor Colonel John Abert, chief of topographical engineers. Over time, misspellings eventually changed Fremont’s Lake Abert to Lake Albert.
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| A recreation area on the south shore has more than 100 campsites. |
The recent development of homes on Lake Albert was an impetus for expanding Lake Region Golf Course to 18 holes. Ron Cooley, manager and golf professional for 27 years, has seen club membership grow to over 200.
The Albert-Poinsett isthmus is the most commercialized area on the lake. North-south Highway 81 becomes a four-lane down the isthmus, skirting past three resorts. Another brand new resort is located on the lake’s south side at Arlington Beach.
Miles away on the lake’s east side is the Dakota Ringneck Lodge where farmers Ken and Ellen Hansen cater to hunters. The Hansens also own other nearby hunting lodges and continue to farm along the lake.
Most of the lake’s shoreline is in Hamlin County, but Brookings County claims a sandy-shored sliver on the south side. Except for a few low-lying spots, most of the shoreline is filled with lake cabins and year-round homes. Over 700 residences, many wedged cheek by jowl, line the lake. Some range up to a million dollars or more in price. Hamlin County Assessor Renee Buck estimates total assessed value of lake property in her county at about $64 million. Joyce Dragseth, Brookings County assessor, places lake property in Brookings County at about $11 million.
All that progress brings problems. In the late 1990s a few lake residents tried to form a legal municipality. The idea raised some cane and more eyebrows and soon was soundly defeated in an election.
The most pressing need is more sanitary sewer systems, says long-time lake development supporter Bob Westall. About a third of the lake homes have sewer service, and although the task of organizing other districts and finding funding is daunting, work continues toward a goal of sewage districts all around the lake. Westall serves on the lake development association with Marv Nofziger and Frank Felix, who also edits the association’s newsletter for its 450 members. Felix is a retired banker from Arlington who lives on the lake year-round.
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| Jody Lemme (with wife Jan) grew up by Poinsett and owned a boat before he had a car. He bought a trailer house on the south shore when he graduated from high school and he has expanded it throughout the years. Their home is now a gathering place for friends from near and far. |
Nofziger and his wife head for Arizona before the snow flies. After retirement as an executive with an office product company, Nofziger and his wife left their home of 33 years in Fresno and moved to South Dakota to be closer to their son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren in Sioux Falls. They selected Lake Poinsett as their summer home because of its proximity to Sioux Falls, but they also liked its beauty, wildlife and golf course.
Nofziger, Westall, Felix and the other board members meet monthly during the summer to work on the problems of lake living. They are developing a website, and they continue to monitor sewage system opportunities, work for better roads and fight the never-ending war against aquatic and noxious weeds. There’s talk of establishing an official weather-reporting site at the golf course, and the board wants the state to install a handicapped fishing and boating dock.
All of the five or six towns within 15 or 20 miles of Lake Poinsett benefit economically from the lake community, but nearby Estelline and Lake Norden are especially blessed.
“It’s huge,” says Tammy Krein of Estelline, speaking of the business lake residents bring to her town. She and husband Ken own the Country Corner at a strategic intersection in the town of 650, where famous author Hayden Carruth edited the local newspaper in the 1880s. The Country Corner is a favorite stop for the lake-bound traveling I-29 from Sioux Falls, Brookings and places in between.
“Our local customers are very loyal, but without the lake customers business would be much different,” Krein says.”They might also stop for groceries at Ward’s Shopping Center, then stop here.”
Across main street from Ward’s is the Red Carpet Lounge, a popular watering hole and eating establishment. Business picks up about 4 p.m. on summer afternoons when lake residents drop in. The Red Carpet and other establishments are also busy when warmly dressed fishermen stop to get supplies and relax after a cold day on the ice.
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| Don Lappe and his granddaughters planted a vineyard near the lake. |
Business is much the same at the other end of the lake in a little town of 500 called Lake Norden. Situated next to a lake of the same name, Lake Norden is the home of South Dakota’s Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame. There’s also a unique toy museum on Main Street, a gift of the late Don Christman, an area farmer.
While the economic impact of Lake Poinsett is tremendous for Lake Norden, it also got a huge boost of cash and confidence in 2002 when a Davisco Foods International cheese plant came to town.
Jeff and Sharon Jager, owners of Lake Norden’s Jager’s Grocery Store, have reached out to Lake Poinsett residents with a store on the lake’s west shore in the Siouxland Resort building.”So far, so good,” she says.
Lake Norden businessman Rusty Antonen says Lake Norden’s summer youth baseball and softball programs draw youngsters spending summers on the lake with their families. It was Rusty’s father, the late Ray Antonen, who envisioned the South Dakota Amateur Baseball Hall of Fame and raised most of the cash to build it.
Many lake dwellers also attend church in Lake Norden, as they do in Estelline.”Poinsett people are part of our community,” Antonen says,”and people in town can certainly tell by the traffic when the summer season ends.”
Lake Poinsett has enjoyed steady growth since the days when Native Americans following the buffalo carefully walked its shores to avoid prickly pear ambushes. The buffalo and cactus are gone, but Lake Poinsett’s inviting beauty still reaches out to capture today’s nomads who come to enjoy what it has always had to offer.
Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2009 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call 800-456-5117.
I started working at South Dakota Magazine in September 2007, but you could argue that I had been preparing for a job here since 1991. That was the year when, at age 12, I finished a 300-page book on my home state.
Now please don’t think I’m some sort of writing prodigy. That was my sixth grade year, and back then all sixth graders studied South Dakota history. The crowning achievement of that year was a South Dakota book, filled with everything learned after nine months of exploring the state.
I spent hundreds of hours working on the project, and I remember realizing that it was the most fun I’d ever had doing homework. I grabbed travel brochures everywhere I went. I clipped photos from newspapers and magazines (including South Dakota Magazine, which my parents have received for years). It was fascinating researching the people and places of the state.
By the spring of 1992 I had nearly 300 pages of reports, pictures and schoolwork, including three county seat quizzes that I aced. (One is shown above. And no, it was not open book). Somehow, those cities and their corresponding counties have, for the most part, stayed in my memory. How many 12-year-olds learn, and never forget, that Gann Valley is the seat of Buffalo County? I should have mentioned that at my job interview.
From that point I’ve never tired of learning about South Dakota. I studied journalism and history at South Dakota State University. After three years at the Brookings Register, I got a master’s degree in history at the University of South Dakota. I studied South Dakota as much as I could in graduate school, and wrote a thesis on Richard Kneip and South Dakota politics in the 1970s.
Today I’m the magazine’s Departments Editor, which means I write and edit copy for our many departments and pen a feature or two for each issue. I’ll also write a weekly column for our website on an aspect of South Dakota history. I’m always looking for ideas, so if you know an interesting character from our past, or an intriguing historical story or mystery, e-mail me at john@southdakotamagazine.com. If you’re in Yankton, stop by our offices at 410 E. Third St. You can talk to me about your idea and we’ll show you around our headquarters, a series of three buildings constructed in the 1870s by territorial governor John Pennington. And if you’re wondering what the seat of Campbell County is, just ask.
