"Tish-ah!" said the grass . . . "Tish-ah, tish-ah!" . . . It bent resiliently under the trampling feet; it did not break, but it complained aloud every time--for nothing like this had ever happened to it before . . . "Tish-ah, tish-ah!" it cried, and rose up in surprise to look at this rough, hard thing that had crushed it to the ground so rudely, and then moved on . . . . The caravan seemed a miserably frail and Lilliputian thing as it crept over the boundless prairie toward the sky line. Of road or trail there lay not a trace ahead; as soon as the grass had straightened up again behind, no one could have told the direction from which it had come or whither it was bound. The whole train--Per Hansa with his wife and children, the oxen, the wagons, the cow, and all--might just as well have dropped down out of the sky.” O. E. Rölvaag, Giants in the Earth.
Soon, upon this virgin grass, temples and palaces would appear. Not dropped from the sky by an almighty, or pushed up from the ground by giants below. They would be built by men upon barren prairie. For if there was no civilization where they had arrived, they would build it. Greek temples of finance and law, Italianate palaces of commerce and trade, Romanesque bastions of learning and fraternity. The will to carve out a fresh life in untamed terrain was matched by a determination to lay the cornerstones of community equal to any settled area of the country they had left behind. Like latter-day Pharoahs, each town’s founders laboriously drew matériel from afar – stout granite columns, durable chisel-faced sandstone block, elaborate tin and terra cotta cornices, vast expanses of plate glass, fluted cast-iron pillars. Dragged by train and oxen it arrived to construct and ornament buildings resolutely as modern as any in Chicago or St. Louis. Care was taken that they be of pleasing design for they served not as mere adornments of beauty in an austere landscape; they manifested progress and permanence and stood as concrete assurance to the people there and arriving of the town’s, and their own, inevitable prosperity. This architectural splendor rising from primal grass elevated the prospects and spirits of the town and its people in this new land.
In the immediate decades following settlement, the new towns delivered on the promise of a viable mode of existence for Americans. The styles would change, but a commitment endured to affect the permanence and promise of these communities with Prairie School and Sullivanesque banks in the 1910s, Art Deco movie theaters, courthouses and post offices in the 1930s and 1940s, modernistic banks and churches into the 1950s and 1960s.
Who would have imagined how swiftly time and technology would ravage these ambitious, hopeful beginnings. Would anyone have come if they had? As machinery allowed one man to do the work of many, the populations and growth prospects of these towns plummeted, and with it, understandably, the commitment to build temples to a future that no longer appeared as boundless as the surrounding plains. Less understandable is the unpardonable destruction of the extant cornerstones of community inherited from a time of waxing fortune – Winner’s High School, Pierre’s Chicago Northwestern Railroad Depot and National Bank of Commerce, majestic courthouses in Stanley, Yankton, Union and Hanson counties , Huron’s Carnegie Library, Madison’s Neo-Classical Masonic Temple, Philip’s and Midland’s twin Italianate banks. A pioneering generation conjured temples and palaces from the air and grass, yet its comfortable descendants cannot muster the energy or imagination to repair and repurpose them. Easier to put up a pole barn.
A cross section of South Dakota’s early small-town architecture not yet sacrificed to expediency is documented here, too often in dispiriting states of endstage decay. Some of what is pictured here is already lost. Unless communities mobilize to preserve these buildings – as they once did to build them – this rich cultural inheritance is doomed. Nothing can return South Dakota’s small towns to their hour of architectural splendor, but its surviving communities can yet draw strength from what remains behind.
Paul S. Swedlund is a native of Winner, South Dakota. He has been a long time resident of Rapid City, serving for 13 years as chairman of the Rapid City Historic Preservation Commission and for a number of years as a member of the Rapid City Arts Council and the Rapid City Planning Commission. In 1993 he founded the Historic Rapid City Foundation, a 501(c)(3) corporation devoted to preserving and restoring Rapid City’s history and architecture. The Foundation restored the 1887 Feigel House, Rapid City’s vintage neon signs and is currently reconstructing and restoring the 1887 McGillicuddy House.
Beginning in 2011, when Swedlund moved to Pierre to serve as Assistant Attorney General for the state of South Dakota, he started traveling the backroads of West River South Dakota photographing and documenting the vanishing historic architecture of South Dakota’s rural communities. Once cornerstones of vibrant communities, banks, Carnegie libraries, general stores, fraternal halls, movie theaters, automobile dealerships, auditoriums, courthouses, gas stations and Main Street commercial buildings of these towns have shuttered and fallen into disrepair. Little remains today and less will remain 20 years hence.
With the aim of capturing more that simple images of buildings and structures, the photos employ the pictorialist aesthetic of Steichen and Stieglitz to move the viewer to contemplate the lives of the people who built and inhabited these places, to portray these places in terms that inspire communities to preserve them and the part of their community identity and memory they represent.