Falls Park

Town promoters from Dubuque, Iowa, reached the falls of the Big Sioux in 1856, drawn by a book that praised their beauty and their water power, and a rival company from St. Paul arrived the next spring and named the place Sioux Falls. It stayed a handful of claim cabins. In August 1862, as war broke out between the Dakota and settlers in Minnesota, the settlers fled, and the empty town was looted and burned. Soldiers and settlers came back in the 1860s, and by the 1880s the railroad had made it a city.

The falls were still supposed to make it rich. Richard Pettigrew, the town's most ambitious promoter and later one of the state's first senators, persuaded the New York investor George Seney to finance a flour mill at the head of the falls, and the Queen Bee Mill, seven stories of pink quartzite cut on the spot, opened on October 25, 1881. It was among the most modern mills in the region, and it failed within two years: the river ran too low too much of the year, and the farms around could not supply enough wheat. A story that Pettigrew had fooled Seney about the water has followed it ever since. The empty mill burned in 1956, and the city knocked down its upper walls; the stump of the lower stories still stands beside the falls.

The Sioux Falls Light and Power Company reused the mill's dam and millrace for a hydroelectric plant built in 1908, which ran until 1974 and now holds a cafe. An observation tower looks down on the falls, and the water is highest and loudest in spring.