The City of East Sioux Falls

One family kept the ground after the town was gone. When the Sioux Falls Granite Company failed in the hard times of the 1890s, George H. Perry took over the property and ran the East Sioux Falls Quarry Company. His family held the ground for more than a century, and in 1999 the Perrys gave most of the original town site to Minnehaha County. It is now the 23-acre Perry Nature Area, kept for its natural setting and the town's historic features. The county's history names James E. Riley alongside Hubbard as the founders of Ives in 1887.

What the plaque says

The City of East Sioux Falls From 1887 to about 1913, this area, bordering the Big Sioux River, was the thriving community of East Sioux Falls. The city boasted a hotel, several boarding houses, saloons and retail stores, a town hall, a cricket team, at least three church congregations, many modest homes and a population of almost 600. Founded by C.W. Hubbard, the city was first called Ives. It was a company town set up to quarry the great deposits of Sioux quartzite and to cut the stone into paving and building blocks. When the post office was established in 1888, Ives was renamed East Sioux Falls. The new name may have sounded more suburban to those courting eastern investors. The city prospered. Large quantities of stone were shipped by the Illinois Central Railroad to Detroit, St. Louis, Chicago and other distant cities. Sioux Falls and other area communities also used the stone in many magnificent examples of 19th century architecture. The industry attracted Welsh, English, and Scottish stonecutters and their families. Their numbers soon outgrew the housing provided by the company. Many moved to Sioux Falls and Rowena, as East Sioux Falls bore a striking resemblance to a mining boom town. Unlike its quiet, sedate neighbors, East Sioux Falls had a bawdy, wide-open appearance, where drinking, fighting and carousing were more than occasional diversions. (Continued on other side) The City of East Sioux Falls (Continued from other side) The work of the stonecutters was highly skilled but dangerous, for they risked contracting a lung ailment from breathing the fine "Jasper dust," a residue of the cutting process. Many cutters died young or were severely disabled by the "stonecutters' consumption." In the summer of 1890 South Dakota's first electric railway, the South Dakota Rapid Transit and Railway Company, made its maiden run between Sioux Falls and East Sioux Falls. The electric line carried cutters to and from the quarries, while others took the "trolley" out to East Sioux Falls on weekends and holidays for picnics in the wooded park along the river, or just for the fun of the ride. On July 4, 1892, 3,500 revelers flocked to the park to be entertained by bands, songs, skits and sports. The financial "Panic of 1893" and growing competition from other materials led to decreased demand for the more elegant, and more costly, quartzite. By 1910, the quarries were producing only a small amount of crushed rock for concrete making. In 1913, the town government self-dissolved. By the 1950s, a store was the only business left, and in 1991 the remaining houses, empty shells, were razed. Once vibrant, now silent, all that remains are some railway spurs, empty quarries, the base for a crusher, stone foundations and the past. Erected in 1994 by the Minnehaha County and South Dakota State Historical Societies and Mary Chilton DAR Foundation

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Falls Park — 6.1 mi
  The falls a town company came for in 1856, abandoned in 1862, and tried to make pay with a seven-story quartzite mill that ran for barely two years.

More markers nearby

• Iverson Crossing Road — 0.9 mi
• Town of Rowena Dakota Territory — 2.4 mi
• The Eminija Mounds — 2.7 mi
• Eminija, Minnesota Territory — 2.7 mi