Fedora Independent Consolidated School District No. 1

Fedora was Miner Center until 1896, renamed because several South Dakota places already carried the name Miner. By local tradition, the new name came from the fedora hats a pioneer merchant sold. The word was then new, taken from Victorien Sardou's 1882 play Fédora, in which Sarah Bernhardt played Princess Fédora Romazoff; it was in use by 1891, and men took up the hat widely only after the Prince of Wales began wearing one in 1924. The 2020 census counted twenty-six residents. The bronze that told the school's story was gone by August 2024.

What the plaque says

Fedora Independent Consolidated School District No 1 Around 1895 the first Fedora village school was the Root School located in section 9 later moved to section 10. In 1905 a new two story wood school was built and used for grades one through ten located two blocks south of this marker on west side of road. The school was consolidated May 15, 1914. July 1915 Fedora voted twenty thousand dollars for a new brick school built three blocks south of this marker on the west side of the road. The first classes were held January 21, 1916. Enrollment was fifteen boys and eight girls in high school and forty nine boys and fifty girls in the grades. The first graduating class was in 1918. The upstairs of the Fedora State Bank building was used for some of the school activities until the Fedora Community Hall was built in 1924 in the extreme north east quarter section 9. The first alumni banquet was 1938 and has been held annually since. The high school closed in 1966 and the grade school in 1970. Dedicated in 2000 by the Fedora Alumni, South Dakota State Historical Society and South Dakota Department of Transportation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 22 mi
  A fortified farming village of about seventy earth lodges above Firesteel Creek a thousand years ago, ancestral to the Mandan, still being excavated under a dome.
• Corn Palace — 23 mi
  The last survivor of more than thirty corn palaces built across the Midwest, a basketball arena with domes by a Chicago theater firm, covered every year in new murals of corn.
• Ingalls Homestead and the De Smet Historic Homes — 28 mi
  The quarter section a mile from De Smet that Charles Ingalls filed on in 1880 and proved up in 1886, the house in town he built, and the cottonwoods he planted.

More markers nearby

• Town of Epiphany — 13 mi
• Howard Public Library, First Chartered Library in Dakota Territory — 13 mi
• Ruskin Park — 15 mi
• Colonel W. H. Nobles — 17 mi