Deadwood Historic District

Deadwood Gulch filled in the spring of 1876, a camp of tents and false fronts strung along the creek on land the Lakota held by treaty. On September 26, 1879, a fire burned more than three hundred of its buildings, and the town rebuilt in brick and stone, which is most of what lines Main Street today. At the northeast end of Main, where anyone coming up the gulch had to pass through it, stood Chinatown, home at its height to some four hundred Chinese miners, launderers, cooks and merchants.

The whole town was made a National Historic Landmark in 1961, and it went on falling apart anyway. Another fire nearly took it in 1959, the last brothels closed after a raid in 1980, and in December 1987 fire gutted part of the commercial core. The next year South Dakota voters approved small-stakes gambling in Deadwood on the condition that part of the money pay for preservation, and the casinos opened on November 1, 1989.

The money rebuilt the town. Gaming taxes have restored storefronts and mansions, the hillside cemetery, and old buildings in towns across the state, and paid for a three-year excavation of Chinatown that recovered more than 400,000 artifacts. New construction on Main Street has to pass the city's historic preservation commission, which is why a street lined with slot machines still looks like the 1880s from the sidewalk, and why some preservationists worry about what the casinos have done to the district behind the fronts.