Ruskin Park

The bronze stops at 1968 without saying why. Under Walter and Dagmar Siegenthaler the park became a rock and roll stop, with Sunday skating and dances on Thursday and Saturday nights; their daughter Karen Crisco remembered Jerry Lee Lewis, Bobby Vee, Freddy Cannon and Buddy Knox. Floods had damaged the buildings, Walter died of a heart attack, and the park closed in 1967. Its ice cream chairs, roller skates and nickelodeon were auctioned in 1968, and the pavilion became a haymow. This plaque replaced a missing one in 2013, paid for by more than sixty donors organized on Facebook.

What the plaque says

Ruskin Park 1/2 Mile South Ruskin Park was synonymous with excitement, entertainment and romance from its inception. The area's first pioneers settled along the James River near here in 1873. The Santee and Rodee families homesteaded south of here, near a large grove (Rodee's Grove), where picnics, political rallies and community gatherings were held. In 1902 Hiram A. Rodee Jr. cleared part of the grove and built a two-story hotel, a lunchroom, stables and other buildings; erected a large canvas auditorium; and named the park after poet and naturalist John Ruskin. Special trains brought thousands of people to this site, the park entrance depot. People built or rented cottages and tents for summer camping. Chautauquas, plays, programs, meetings and picnics soon made Ruskin Park the cultural and entertainment center of Sanborn County. In 1910 Robert E. Dowdell and Ben H. Millard purchased the park and made further improvements, adding a theater, forty cabins and one of the fastest one-mile race tracks around, still visible on satellite images. Over the years, many local and nationally famous bands played to hundreds in the glass dance pavilion. Later park proprietors were Marion C. Dowdell, 1930-1949; Don Shaw, 1949-1954; and Walter and Dagmar Siegenthaler, 1954-1968.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mitchell Prehistoric Indian Village — 19 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 — 21 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.

More markers nearby

• Colonel W. H. Nobles — 8.2 mi
• Fedora Independent Consolidated School District No. 1 — 15 mi
• Carl Gunderson: 11th Governor of South Dakota — 21 mi
• Old Mill Stone — 21 mi