Fort Sisseton Historic State Park

After the Dakota war in Minnesota in 1862, the army pushed a line of posts out onto the plains, and on August 1, 1864, soldiers of the 30th Wisconsin Infantry began this one on the high ground of the Coteau des Prairies among a scatter of lakes. They called it Fort Wadsworth, for a general killed that spring in Virginia. The first buildings were logs, some of them hauled more than twenty miles from the timbered ravines at Sica Hollow; fieldstone and brick replaced them. In 1876 the army found it already had a Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island and renamed this one for the Sisseton, the Dakota band whose men served the post as scouts.

No fight ever reached it. For twenty-five years it was the center of a huge, thinly settled district, garrisoned in turn by Minnesota cavalry, regular infantry, and in 1885 a company of the 25th Infantry, one of the army's Black regiments. By the late 1880s it had no purpose left, and the last soldiers marched out in June 1889. The state took it over and let it fall apart.

It has been rescued twice since. Works Progress Administration crews restored the buildings in the 1930s, painting the interiors, for reasons nobody recorded, pink. Twenty years later they were decaying again, and Robert Perry, a man who had first seen the fort as a boy and came to be called the Fort Sisseton Kid, gathered petitions until the legislature made it a state park in 1959. Fourteen stone and brick buildings now stand around the parade ground, among them the barracks, the officers' quarters, the guardhouse, a powder magazine and a long stone stable.