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- Welcome to Dakota Life Detours.

We're gonna travel some side roads and visit three Dakota Life stories that you haven't seen on television before.

Our host for this detour is the Adams Museum in Deadwood.

We're here in the Northern Hills, where in 1930, businessman w Adams founded the Adams Museum here in Deadwood.

His goal was to preserve and display history of the Black Hills.

The building here was later donated to the city, but the rich history of this area demands more than just one building.

The Deadwood history story also includes the Brothel Deadwood, the days of 76 Museum, the Historic Adams House, and the Homestake Adams Research and Cultural Center.

Some of the top attractions on exhibit here at the Adams Museum are Potato Creek, Johnny's original gold nugget over seven Troy ounces.

There's a historic pencil sketch, drawing of Wild Bill Hickok, and believe me, so much, much more.

Let's take a little trip down the road.

Now, the Deep Creek Church is in rural kin county near Midland, South Dakota.

It's where you would find settlers that came from Norway.

The immigrants there arrived in the early 20th century and developed a deep connection and commitment not only to faith, but also the land.

- Billy asked the pastor, what do you see as the future of this church?

And he says, I'd close it.

And I'm like, oh, how can you do that?

How can you say that to someone if you actually paid attention to this group?

You see how much love they have for gathering together in that place.

How can you not be affected by that love and that pride?

They want to be together.

They are that beacon within that community.

- Most of this country was homesteaded in 19 0 6, 19 0 7.

The first church services were in Norwegian, Hawkin County.

There were so many settlers that came from Norway, and they named it after the King of Norway.

It was King Hawkin for our family.

They had a house and then the church, and then the buildings came afterwards, like the barns, and that all came after the church.

So it's kind of cool that that was their mission.

You know, they, they had this deep rooted faith, I guess, in wanting to worship and have a place to worship and gather.

I think that's one thing.

They relied on their neighbors more.

They got together more.

That was a reason for a centralized church.

- I've served places before that were kind of in the middle of nowhere, but this, oh, I had no idea.

This is the middle of nowhere.

And I love it.

I absolutely love it that people out there, as far apart as they are, are committed to gathering together in this place.

And so it's just, I love it.

I love it.

I'll accept the snakes.

Not a fan of the snakes or the outhouse.

- We have no running water in the church.

So we have an outhouse.

- Here's a couple of them that will run to Billy's house, to the bathroom.

Hi.

- We have no telephone, but we all have cell phones now, so it's not that big a deal.

But we do have electricity.

But it's quaint.

I mean, it's, it's, we don't think anything about it.

We get along just fine.

- He come a booking and a running.

He grabbed the gun and he's like, rattlesnake, rattlesnake.

Oh, I'm not going in there until winter.

If I have to, I'll go in the winter, but I'm not going now.

- But yeah, so it's old fashioned, I guess you might say.

- I love the fact that they, they retain that, that mindset and that way of life.

They're not gonna change no matter how many times I mentioned getting an indoor toilet, they're not gonna do it.

And that's okay.

I love the fact that they are, this is, you know, this is how we do things out here.

- Well, it's where we go vote.

And you know, you're supposed to not mix church and politics, but that's where, that's literally our voting precinct.

That's where we go vote.

So every, you know, that's where the elections are.

It's - Interesting that in this day and age, they're still committed to doing things there.

It would be easier to go and do it someplace else, you know, go to a hall or something like that to go and do things.

But no, we're committed to doing things at the church and everyone in the community latches onto that.

- Yeah, I feel very strongly about it.

I mean, we all have our own pew, you know, we, if somebody sits in our pew, we get upset.

You know, it's like our pew.

So, I mean, it's, it's our home.

I mean, it really is.

It's, it's a great place to connect to the past, I guess, too.

You can walk down the cemetery and, you know, literally they're there, your whole family.

For me to see it every day, I can physically see it every day is pretty cool.

You know, I can think, well, if I have a tougher day or something, I can just look over there and say, Hey, it's still there, so keep going - Forward.

- I'm gonna say it's a beautiful thing just because it helps them retain their own roots within that community.

You know, this is how my dad, my mom, their parents, my uncles, aunts, that's how they did it.

So that's how we will do it.

- Every family out here is knitted into the church.

I mean, the, the place I live on was the Sand Bowl family, and they were original founders.

All those families are really rooted into the church.

They're still there, hums still around, sandals still around, you know, so those families are, are still in the community.

Still very viable here.

You know, my great-great-grandfather came here and we're still worshiping in the same church, you know, after 115 years.

And it's unique.

I mean, it's, but we do take a lot of pride in the church.

- The pride in the church is, is amazing.

Absolutely amazing.

You know, you see that in the passion that they have.

It's what do we need to do to care for what we have and save it for the future?

Because it would be easy, so easy to slip and just let it fall by the wayside.

You know, I see so many of those small little churches on my, on my travels that are vacant.

It's awfully scary right now.

The amount of closures happening, rural churches are really dropping at a, an alarming rate.

The polls are finally catching up, but people are being honest about belief and about faith.

I'm gonna do whatever I can to go and help these churches survive.

If there are people there that still want to go to church, we're still gonna do church.

You know, we're gonna hold on as long as we can because we are never gonna get it back.

I don't think so.

We'll swing back eventually, but these small churches, that's not where the growth is gonna be seen.

You have to do what you gotta do in order to keep that going within that community.

'cause once it's gone, it will not come back.

- I think the ranching farming lifestyle is a very, it's a hard life because we deal with so many things.

We can't control.

We can't control the weather, we can't control the markets.

We can't control input costs.

We're hoping next year's better.

We're hoping, you know, so we have this faith built right into our livelihood, and it carries on over into religion.

- There is such, such a connection between faith and the land.

Because of that reliance, dedication, and commitment, you realize the commitment they have to not only the land living out here, but also to their faith.

I love going out there.

I love spending time with those people because of that.

- Deadwood history is driven by larger than life personalities.

Wild Bill, calamity Jane, Seth Bullock, and even poker Alice.

So who was WE Adams?

Well, William Emery Adams was 23 years old when he came to Deadwood in 1877.

He arrived with his older brother and they operated a grocery store on Main Street.

He married a few years later, and his business provided a comfortable lifestyle for his wife and children.

The Adams changed residences in Deadwood several times, and each time moving into a larger and more elegant home.

Aside from having a successful business, WE Adams served six terms as mayor and was involved in the days of 76 celebration, which began in 1924.

He had a personal desire to build a museum.

Museum.

It was his way to honor his wife and two daughters who had passed away prior to 1930.

Let's head over to Sisseton now, where the community has embarked on several exciting public art projects, starting with sculpture installations in the two new roundabouts along the highway with AAN Area Arts Council, collaborating with the city artists and many others.

- There was a roundabout proposal here in Sisseton, and this space was donated, or as part of the city property, and the idea is to turn it into a green space that could turn into kind of like a sculpture park.

So the arts council and the city really made it happen that, you know, every, a lot of people came together from the community.

There's a lot of community support behind it to, to see it kind of fall through.

My name is in Bamani.

I'm in Sisseton, South Dakota, and I'm working on Kuka Sacred Movement, a large scale stone sculpture step into my studio.

The stone itself is 60,000 pounds, or about 30 tons of stone, which came from Mankato, Minnesota.

Each stone block is about three feet by three feet, and it starts off at a three foot pillar, and then it goes up one foot at a time until it reaches the top one, which is 10 feet tall.

And just for reference, the smallest block, the three foot by three foot by three foot weighs about 1,500 pounds.

So the largest one weighs closer to like 10,000 pounds.

So it's a pretty big project.

This landscape really has a long history of women standing up and seeing that there's a need in the community and making that change now so that future generations can really benefit, kind of reap the fruit from it.

This is dolomite limestone.

On the hardness scale, there's definitely harder stones like granite, but it's not an easy stone like soap stone.

So it, it's kind of in that, in-between space.

Other than size and scale for this project, I think one of the, the most notable differences is that if you remove something, you can't put it back.

So you really have to be confident.

You have to know when you're cutting something that depth that it's at, because once it's removed, it's pretty difficult or impossible to put something back in.

Culturally growing up, one of the things that, like my grandparents would always say is like, the stone is your relative.

And I really like that.

And I take that mind frame of that.

The stone is kind of like my grandfather thinking about this project.

One of the things that really came up to me when talking to elders was the importance of memory.

And I kept thinking about that.

What is the importance of memory and public art?

I think as an artist, you have a responsibility when making artwork that it represents one, the people who are around in that area, but also the stories that have survived thousands of years in this area as well.

I think that's a really great responsibility.

In a lot of indigenous cultures.

We talk about women as being that backbone of a community, that they're the ones that hold everything up.

They're the ones that are able to, you know, hold that structure for a family.

When the reservation was first established, a lot of people had a hard time, and it was really women who are the ones that kept on, kept those traditions alive, wanted better, and they made this place better.

And each pillar behind her are gonna be petroglyphs.

So modern day petroglyphs that represent the community today, that first pillar will be hand prints of the community and the community will be able to come in, place their hand in ink, and then place their hand on one of four sides.

And each side will be documented so that in a hundred years, 150 years, 200 years, somebody can come back to this community and say, that was my great great grandfather's handprint.

I have a connection to this land.

I have a connection to this community.

And it's a way of remembering, you know, that aspect.

And each pillar after that, you know, it represents different parts like the medicines or the wild plants in this area, the agriculture, which has, you know, survived in this area for over a thousand years.

Following that is the wildlife.

This area has a rich biodiversity.

The last pillar, the, the smallest pillar represents our modern day existence.

If you turn on your car, all those symbols pop at you.

And the reason I think about that is 'cause our ancestors had symbols that meant something to them.

You know, if, if there wasn't buffalo, if there wasn't fish, if there wasn't, you know, something to eat immediately they knew.

But our modern day existence is that if our phone isn't charged, we know pretty immediately whether we like that or not.

That's part of our modern day existence.

And I was interested in that because I asked the same questions of the past that I know the future is gonna ask.

One of the really great parts of this public artwork, this sculpture, is that it's, it's being carved in the center of town.

So you have the hospital up there, you have the courthouse back here, then you have Main Street and Highway 10, which is like the main highway that passes through here.

And the really great part is that it really demystifies the art making process for people.

I think when you tell stories, it gets to a core belief in humanity.

It just makes the whole town feel different.

You know, you have pride within it.

- In another part of Deadwood, you'll find the story of the days of 76.

It was a celebration of the prospectors, spins, mule, Skinners, and Madams who all poured into the Black Hills in 1876.

The celebration began in 1924, and it's grown into an annual event with a historic parade and an award-winning PRCA rodeo.

The days of 76 museum features horse drawn wagons, stage coaches, carriages, clothing memorabilia, and all the archives of the days of 76 celebrations.

It's now a state-of-the-art facility featuring a variety of different sites and sounds for you to enjoy.

Another sensory experience are the sight and the smells of a coffee shop, and all those fresh baked goods.

The Mother-daughter Trio of Kerry, Tricia, and Jenny were told that a fancy coffee shop wouldn't survive in a small town of just 800.

Well, it's a good thing that those three didn't listen.

- Couple of guys came to install our espresso machine.

He said, we uninstall more machines than we install in a year, meaning that coffee shops are, there's a lot of coffee shops closing.

He gave a high percentage, and I don't wanna specifically quote, but it was like something like 90% of coffee shops close before their espresso machine's warranty runs out.

Oh yeah.

Even the guy that installed our machine didn't really think we were going to make it.

- I don't know what makes coffee so addictive, but when I go to bed at night, I look forward to having my Americano in the morning.

- Like, I really wish that I could just drink a black cup of coffee, and I can't, I don't like, I've had to really learn to like coffee, but there's something about the temperature of it or the smell of it.

Probably for me it's the smell.

Like even when I didn't drink coffee, I would make a pot of coffee because I loved the smell.

- I've thought about quitting.

But I think it would be, it would take away a pleasure.

It's just a pleasure.

I look forward to, so I'm not gonna give it up.

- Coffee shops, I mean, we would go places and find a coffee shop to sit down, just people coming in and just the atmosphere for me, it's not necessarily the cup of coffee, but the coffee shop atmosphere is probably my favorite.

- How the coffee culture got started, I'm, I'm not sure.

I just picked up on it.

And that was something that I really wanted to bring to Philip, because that was the piece for me.

That was a big piece that was missing when we came back here.

So - I went about trying to like figure out what do I have to do to start a coffee shop, talk to somebody in Rapid.

And she said, well, what you need to do is fly to Las Vegas.

They're having a coffee fest there and get some help from them for the price of the business seminar.

You get a consultation with one person that will give you advice.

And so I explained to 'em that the town is small, about 800 people.

And he said, and he's saying this, everybody's around hearing what he's saying.

He said, your chances of making it work on a scale of one to 10 is a negative three.

- I mean, I think she's still considered doing one even after that, but I don't know what it was that made her decide not to do it.

But I honestly think had she tried it, then it probably wouldn't have worked then.

- It was probably the right decision.

She was going to be on her own.

The coffee culture hadn't quite hit yet, and I think her idea of a coffee shop was a little bit different than the trending coffee.

The timing probably wasn't right, and it was probably good that she waited 10 years.

- The way it turned out that we bought that house is, I have a little house right across the street, so it was the first everything.

It was like a perfect storm.

- My mom had started a daycare, well, kind of, my sister started a daycare for my mom, and the last grandkid of my mom's went off to school.

And we were sitting on the front porch of the daycare having coffee, and we really wanted to see the house.

It was a neat house, but when we walked in the house, we knew like this would make a perfect coffee shop.

- You know, we've been to quite a few coffee shops and old homes, and I guess that was kind of the vibe that, the comfort of a old home and the smell of coffee.

I think the perfect environment for a coffee shop.

I, I guess that's, you know, why the, the house spoke to us.

- We had to be sitting on my porch at the same time.

They were moving everything out, or it wouldn't have happened.

We wouldn't have looked in the house and it wouldn't have captured us like it did - Then.

It just kept going, and I kept expecting them to like stop the idea of it.

And, but I didn't wanna be the one that said no.

So I just went along with it and it never stopped.

So - We first came up with the idea alternative grounds.

That was going to be the name, but I don't really know who, if it was Tricia or Jenny who came up with that name.

I, it wasn't me, but I, I was good with it.

I thought that was, I thought that was good, but now, now I'm glad that's not what we chose.

It doesn't have the same ring to it.

Let's meet at alternative grounds.

Let's meet at Jenny's.

My mom had been diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor when she was 24.

She had eloped when she was 15 years old against her mom's wishes.

Had me when she was 16, had four kids by the time she was 23, I believe she was known for being a kind woman, and she was very hospitable, and it seemed appropriate to have a place named after her.

- I never got to meet her.

So that was actually, that's been probably one of my favorite things about the coffee shop.

You know, having my mom and my sister and my grandpa passed away, but he would come and sit and have coffee and, you know, all of us are gathering at Jenny's - Mom.

Just thought it would be really cool if people said, let's all meet at Ginny's.

We thought that was a great idea.

It stuck.

And people, that's what happens.

Let's meet at Ginny's or bring me Ginny's when you come, or, you know.

So I, I don't think we could have picked a better name - Because it's named after grandma.

Our motto would be scatter joy, and that was what we wanted to do with the coffee shop is scatter joy.

And so kind of relating that to my grandma, I think she would've liked that it was a very positive place - The way she lived.

Maybe she passed it down to generations to extend hospitality to people and just be interested in people and maybe having a place where her family can have some joy.

Because I just, I don't know how she coped with the idea that she was leaving behind little kids.

And I think I like the thought that her kids and her grandkids are enjoying her name's sake.

- I'm very thankful for Jenny's because I feel like it allowed me to spend more time with grandparents and special people, you know, that I wouldn't have got to without Jenny's.

So - I think it started out maybe as a redemption story, and it's evolved more into the Ginny story, doing what's right for the people around you, and our whole motto of scattering joy, bringing that culture to a community.

So I, I, I think she's smiling, I think she's proud, honored, - Who is fan showing the smallest of things.

That is what we found in you.

- Deadwood History is kind of an umbrella group that invites you to visit the days of 76 Museum, the Adams Museum, stop by the historic Adams house, or check out the work that's going on at the Home Stake, Adams Research and Cultural Center.

And while they're clear to point out that the Brothel Deadwood is not an attempt to glamorize prostitution, it is an integral part of the narrative of Deadwood's history.

That's why they have a series of eight rooms curated with period appropriate furniture to help transport you back to that era.

But first, start with a [email protected].

Then come out and see us in the Northern Hills for a visit.

Our thanks to the vision of we Adams and the whole staff at Deadwood History.

And thanks to you for watching.

You can replay or share stories or even full episodes of Dakota Life at sdpb.org/dakota Life.

Join us again for another Dakota Life Detours and for all of us at sdpb.

Thanks for watching.