Lemmon Petrified Wood Park

Ole S. Quammen came into Lemmon on the first passenger train in 1907, ran a lumberyard and served as the town's mayor, and spent his spare time walking the ranches of the Grand River country, where petrified logs and bones lay on the open range. Ranchers thought him odd for hauling them away. In 1930, with the Depression on, he put out-of-work men to collecting the stone by the wagonload and building it into something travelers would stop for.

What they built, opening in May 1932, fills a city block downtown: more than a hundred spires, cones and pyramids of cemented petrified wood, some of them twenty feet tall, so that drivers coming in off the treeless prairie would find themselves passing through a forest of stone. There is a wishing well, a waterfall, and the Castle, an octagonal tower of spires and turrets built of some three hundred tons of petrified wood and dinosaur and mammoth bone. A museum of petrified logs with a floor of petrified grass followed in 1933, and Quammen faced the gas station he owned at the end of the block in the same stone. The round boulders scattered through the park are cannonball concretions from the Cannonball River just over the North Dakota line.

Quammen and his son David both died in 1934. His daughter Alice ran the park for twenty years and in 1954 gave it to the city on the condition that it never be altered, and it has stayed as he built it. At Christmas the stone trees are strung with lights.