There's a chill in the air.

And there's no doubt that it's once again a glorious autumn in South Dakota.

Hello, and welcome to Dakota Life.

I'm your host, Michelle Van Monaghan.

Have you ever noticed, as you travel around the country that each region has something that symbolizes that particular place?

New England has its lighthouses.

Chicago has its skyline.

San Francisco has its Golden Gate Bridge.

South Dakota, too, has a structure that symbolizes our land and our people.

Perhaps better than any other.

No, it's not Mount Rushmore.

It's the barn.

In our first segment, we're going to take a tour of some unique, historic and cleverly designed barns that.

They are as much a part of our landscape as the windswept grass that blows across the prairie.

There is much a part of our heritage as the crops that are stored in them, and the livestock they protect.

But as the rural lifestyle of the past gives way to the technology of the future, the old barns are slowly leaving us.

Once upon a time, the barn was the center of farm life.

It was a warehouse for the fruits of our labor.

It was a safeguard for our livestock.

It was a factory turning out food for the world, and it was a social gathering place for rural communities.

But as modern technology has created fewer and larger farms, the old barns are quickly becoming obsolete, sitting alone and neglected across the countryside.

But not all of them.

These barns on the Frawley Ranch near Spearfish are living pieces of history.

These are barns that were built by my grandfather, Henry Frawley, in the 1880s and 1890s.

And these are barns that are known as courtyard barns.

And the reason the course the name is given them is because there are courtyards within the within the complex.

And the reason they built these back in those days was they were primarily seeking shelter, for horses and cattle.

The barns, with their stone base and wooden upper sections form a square courtyard providing shelter on all four sides.

While the horses stayed safe and secure behind the four walls of this courtyard.

All you have to do is walk through this door.

To find a courtyard designed for cattle.

The barns and of course, had a much different function and use as they have today.

There were a lot of animals here that were being used almost on a daily basis.

And, so that's the reason for the elaborate facilities in this area.

We have, you know, as you do all through South Dakota, you have, you're subjected to storms and, and unpleasant weather and, having a courtyard like this, which is totally enclosed and plus the, the shaded areas that we have around the, the courtyards and then the lofts up above for the storage of hay and straw really provide, a very, wonderful environment for horses and cattle in times of bad weather.

The barns on the Frawley Ranch are also unique.

Historians tell me that you have to go to Europe to find this style of architecture and barns, that they were rarely used in America.

And the Park Service, when they designated the ranch as a National Historic Landmark, told us that they didn't know of the existence of any other courtyard barns in America except these.

They tell a great story, and they certainly, a attribute, you know, to our ancestors who came to the Dakotas and homesteaded in the settled this rather a harsh land and environment.

And, and of course, in those days they had a wonderful and very important function.

And, and so I think they're they're certainly a living testament to our agricultural history.

While the strong, solid lines of barn architecture often reflected the strong, solid beliefs of their builders.

Some like to add a little personality.

This is the Alex Frier farm near Draper, complete with its own unique piece of history.

A round barn.

Yeah, this is a place where milk cows and the stanchions, they're.

Cows in that we feed them from the front.

They're.

Cleaning the manure off the back.

You know, that's closer to the door that way.

Over the years, this round barn has served Alex Friar in many ways.

He used to milk cows in it, had horses where he worked horses and had them horses in here, and milk cows.

And later years, while we just had stock cattle.

And they used that tray just for shelter in the winter time.

And then the last quite a few years I raised sheep.

And so I kept cheap in here and lamb in here sometimes.

And I kept them when they growing up and, and even fed them out and kept they come in here in the summertime, which was kind of cool.

And that amount in fact, to fatten up.

The shape of the barn is actually a very clever design.

You put your feed upstairs there and you put it down, and you can force feed yourself in front of the horses and the cows, and you can always walk around behind.

And when you're milking cows, you know, you just walk around them and they're right there, you know, and horses, you harness them from behind and it's too easy to get out.

Besides the central feeding system and easy access to livestock.

The round barn also serves another very important purpose.

I think the wind don't catch him as much, and and it can destroy him easy.

Some barns still serve their intended purpose.

Some slowly fade away, and some have found a whole new life.

Like this one on the Don Funk Farm near Madison.

This barn is now a hunting lodge.

Don and Bonnie Funk run phone crest, a licensed shooting preserve.

We bought the farm in 1962 and moved here.

The barn was in fairly good shape then, but empty, and we used it for several years to raise feeder pigs in.

But pigs are very hard on buildings, and by the time the 80s rolled around and we were kind of looking at going broke, the the barn was in very bad shape and we decided to run our to open our sporting clays course, to run with our hunting preserve.

We renovated it at that time in 1984 and made it into our clubhouse.

Fixing up the old barn was a challenge.

The walls you could see out of everywhere and so they had to all be replaced.

The foundation on the east side all had to be replaced.

When we took the studs out, the roof kind of sagged, so we had to jack it up and put these beams across.

While barns of long ago served as gathering places with barn raisings and social events such as barn dances.

The Funk Barn emerged into a new kind of meeting place.

We have coffee for our neighbors every morning at 9:00.

We usually fill this room up pretty much with, neighbors sometimes during the flood years.

We call it our farmer support group, and they just still show up and trade information and solve all the problems of the world right around that table.

I don't know of a single person that doesn't walk in here and say, wow, isn't this wonderful?

It's just the perfect.

It's the perfect setting for our business because it's rustic, homey.

We don't want to be too clean because we want people to feel free to walk in with muddy boots and make themselves at home.

And everybody really loves it.

Stately structures that frame our past.

Pieces of living history, outdated and updated.

Each barn with a story to tell.

Each a piece of our history.

All across the country, more and more people are becoming interested in preserving these old structures.

A Smithsonian exhibit even celebrates the cultural significance of barns.

Barns were probably not the first permanent structures to break the skyline of the prairies when our ancestors first settled Dakota Territory.

That honor was probably left to the lowly Soddy, a house built from materials found literally at the feet of our ancestors.

A bright, clear sky over a plain so wide that the rim of the heavens cut down on it around the entire horizon.

In the novel Giants in the Earth Rule, Vogue wrote about the vastness of the prairie and what a desolate wilderness it was.

So why did settlers come to this no man's land?

Perhaps they came because this desolate country was the stuff that dreams are made of.

Free land.

The Homestead Act was passed in 1861, giving any person or family, head of household, an opportunity for 160 acres out in the West.

If they would plant, plow and plant 1010 acres, build a habitable house and live on it for five years, then the claim became theirs, free and clear.

Settlers chose sod houses because they were warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

The dirt floor, when packed, would become as hard as concrete and could even be scrubbed.

But sod houses weren't built for these reasons.

They were built because sod was the only material available.

They would plow and they were plowing to till, and so they plowed with a special plow.

It had two horizontal, rods on it, which as the dirt was being plowed, it would turn the sod over and, lay it dirt side up.

And then the homesteader would, cut through in the size of the blocks that they wanted.

The blocks were usually, three feet by two feet.

And, when they would build the home, they would make it either 2 or 3 blocks deep, and then they would stagger the blocks as they started building up.

It was not an easy job, and it was tiresome and burdensome.

No mortar was used to hold the sod together.

Some settlers would, however, drive stakes through the corners to stabilize the walls.

Other than being made of sod, no two sides were alike, and most settlers did not even know how to build one.

I think they picked it up from somebody that had already built, probably who the first ones were.

There's a lot of speculation about who were the first people to build sod houses on the prairie.

The Indians had the history, particularly the Mandan's.

Their houses were circular, however, and not quite in the classes.

Our societies.

They varied in size from eight by 10 to 12 by 16.

That was the general range.

But I did come across one that, the homesteader came early in spring and built a side house in West River 40ft by 25ft, and included the barn so that the animals were under the same roof as the house.

They were very thankful for that, for that kind of a structure.

When the winter came and the blizzards howl, they did not have to leave their shelter to take care of the animals.

The roof was made of many different materials.

Some settlers used wood if they could find it, or corrugated tin if they could afford it, but most improvised.

They used some kind of limbs.

They go to the river and and cut limbs and lay them across.

The, gable roof was common.

And then, they would take, branches with leaves and weave them, across the rods and then put sod on top of that sod.

Houses were generally supposed to be temporary structures, but bad weather and poor crops sometimes postpone building the farmhouse for many years.

The first upkeep that I think they found that they really needed was to stretch some kind of cheesecloth or fabric, on the ceiling, because dirt, insects, bugs, sometimes snakes would fall out of the roof and into the cook pot and, it was very dark in the house.

And so they found if they could whitewash it, get slake their line, find some elements like it, and make a whitewash that that would lighten the interior.

Of course, glass was very expensive and scarce, so there were few windows.

And the windows they had were small.

So interesting about the windows.

Some put the windows on the outside of the house, and then had the deep reveal of the depth of the wall for storage on the inside.

But if they whitewashed the reveal, put the windows on the inside, they could get more light into the side.

Without proper upkeep, a sad house would not last forever.

There are, however, some that are still standing today.

The replica at Prairie Village in Madison was built in 1966 due to the foresight Abena Jacobs.

She wanted others to experience life in a sod house as she remembered it from her days growing up.

She just took it from scratch.

She had from memory the floor plan and dimensions of the home she had lived in in Canada.

They say when she left there she was probably mid-teens, something like that.

So she had a good first hand experience at it and living in one and so forth.

And, it was her idea.

She was principal of an elementary school here and, unmarried and and really, really put her heart and soul into the project.

The sod house at Prairie Village is authentic, right down to the decor.

Some of it belonged to Bina, and others were, friends and different people that found out she was doing this.

Gave her things.

They donated things.

Everything in there was donated and is to be left in there.

Bina was really fussy.

She'd only take replica or not replica.

She wanted exact things from that era and nothing fancy because she said the families then didn't have fancy things.

Very few fancy things were ever brought with them because they came in wagons.

You couldn't bring things.

I know she, used to have us come and help cut even newspaper because she said they didn't have the resources for other stuff, and even newspapers were rare, but that's what they used to cut.

Like, for their window, curtains to line the shelves.

It was all cut about, like you do a snowflake line or or paper doll line, but they were real resourceful.

Although Bina has passed away, her legacy of sod houses lives on.

People are always amazed at how small it is.

But yet when you look inside, how much they got in there, how one family could live in their, you know, a whole winter.

Give people a real, firsthand look at what life was like here about the turn of the century.

And, the sod house certainly fills that role.

It's one of the most popular attractions in the village.

And, for several years, there was always a long line.

There are very few side houses left to remind us of the hardships that early pioneers endured settling the West.

But if you want to see one, you can visit the historic Prairie Village two miles west of Madison, on the edge of Lake Herman.

In our third and final segment, we're going to take a step back into the living history of Dakota life.

If you grew up in South Dakota, chances are that you or someone you know received their education in a very different way for most of today's students.

We're going to visit with some kids who are learning the old fashioned way, and some adults devoted to preserving a very special part of our history.

It's the first day of a new school year in Iona.

A scene filled with new book bags, new school supplies, and new expectations.

But these students are actually part of a tradition that has been around since the earliest settlers first arrived.

A tradition that's quickly disappearing from the landscape.

Meet Tanya, Kayla, Dustin, Charlie, Tucker, Ryan, and Amber.

The entire student body of Iona's one room rural school.

Just look at what you will learn by the end of the year.

The ranchers and I am a rancher, and so it's easy to relate to them.

And it's easy for them to relate to me.

Mrs. sur teaches kindergarten through eighth grade at Iona School.

She faces some challenges that other teachers can identify with.

I'm trying to get the grades to balance.

It is a challenge to to be teaching nouns or verbs over here and and have to switch gears and be teaching adverbs and adjectives or that's that is a big challenge to try to keep everybody going and on to.

She also faces more unique challenges.

Because it is so small.

I have a hard time getting the big kids not to answer the little kids questions, you know, because they're just so excited that that they know, you know, and and that happens a lot.

And I really have to tell them, okay, this is a first grade question.

So rural schools are becoming very rare.

In 1918, over 5000 of them dotted the countryside.

Their numbers have dwindled.

And now, at the dawn of the new millennium, there are only 50 still in operation.

There just hasn't been a need for them because of the people moving to the city, moving to town.

And, transportation is much easier than it used to be.

We feel like we still need it out here a little bit because of the distance for these little, little kids.

To come.

As you look around the countryside, as you drive around, you'll see abandoned farm after abandoned farm.

Bigger farms, smaller families.

You just don't see the number of children in the rural areas that you used to.

And we see it in town as well as in our.

Rural school.

With the rural schools nearly gone.

Some people have decided to preserve their heritage.

This is the Grande Valley schoolhouse near canton.

Although classes haven't been held regularly here for a number of years, it remains as an educational tool for future generations thanks to the Rural School Historical Society.

Roma Larson is a member of the society as well as a former teacher at the school.

I always have felt grateful for my own education in rural school.

And, There's something about.

Having the mix of the different grades that you learn from each other.

And I do think that's good.

Grand Valley School is being preserved as a historical site, complete with everything found in a one room classroom.

Members of the historical society use the school to educate city kids about South Dakota's rural heritage.

There's so many of the people today that don't realize what the older generations had to put up with to get an education and a livelihood, and the rural schools was a fact on the rural life.

They had their rural schoolhouse as a meeting place for township to hold elections, and school district was the main source of community.

The community was the school was the community.

I kind of like the programs that we put on, because then the whole community came to the school and enjoyed themselves and could see their children in the place, and sometimes there were funny things that happened that just wasn't prepared.

It wasn't expected.

I was one of those characters that could come up with all the ideas.

We had all these big boys you could talk into doing this stuff, like sneaking a cow into the school building or something, and they got in trouble and you just sat there very angelic.

Get by with.

I have grandchildren, and that's why I can get really emotional about this school building.

Because kids, they love to hear the stories, but then they want to see the story.

And now, because of what they've done with this building, I can bring kids out here.

And it's a visual.

They actually come out here and see that a lunch bucket was actually a sirup can, and an outhouse, and that usually gets some reactions.

I have a garage at my place that's a rural school.

However, I obtained a piece of land that had this schoolhouse on it and I moved it home.

It's a good garage, really a good god.

But that's where most of these world schools ended up, either in a church, as a chicken house, or as a garage.

I think it's very important to preserve the past, whether it's a schoolhouse or even an old building, an old house.

If you don't preserve them, they don't go out there.

They'll disappear, and you miss that.

You just won't have it.

While the Grand Valley School remains as a piece of history back in Iowa, Mrs. Sir's class continues to prepare for their future.

There are tools or modern.

The outhouses are gone and the internet is just one click away.

But the sense of community remains as strong as ever.

There's not as many kids and like if the teacher is helping the little kids and one of the big kids needs help, I can go and help them.

Or they can come and help me.

What if I didn't?

It's more freedom to be themselves and more freedom to explore without worrying so much about what the other kids are going to say.

I mean, we never have the problem with they have to wear the right clothes, you know, so they get to find out who they are.

I think better.

I think the main thing as I, as I look at it, the one on one, one teacher, seven children, that gets quite personal, if I might.

And I mean that in a positive fashion.

The other part of it is that these kids form a pretty solid bond.

Mrs. Peterson and I come out here every now and then, and these kids really do form a solid bond amongst themselves, and it's nice to see that.

And they're good, polite kids.

Not that our town kids aren't, but it's just a different sense when you come out here, different feel.

I think as long as they have the students, they'll have the schools.

It looks good out here.

We have seven students now and it doesn't look like it's going to get any smaller.

One room full of history.

One room full of hope for the future.

Each in its own way.

Preserving the legacy of education in South Dakota.

Former students of rural schools say that in addition to the quality education, the common bond they developed with their classmates is their most lasting and pleasant memory of their school days.

Well, that's all the time we have for this edition of Dakota Life.

We hope you've enjoyed the program.

If you have an idea for a future Dakota Life segment, please drop us an email at Dakota Life at SDB Seaborg, or call us at 1877 talk PTV.

That's 1-877-825-5788.

Or you can write to us at Dakota Life South Dakota Public Television box 5000 Vermillion 57069.

Join us next time as we go in search of new stories on Dakota life for South Dakota Public Television.

I'm Michel Martin.

Thanks for watching and.