State Game Lodge

The state built the first lodge here in 1921 as a game keeper's house and meeting place for its new game preserve. It burned within three months of being finished, and the stone-and-timber lodge that replaced it opened in 1922, with deep porches across the front and a row of dormers under the roof.

Five years later Peter Norbeck, by then a United States senator, persuaded President Calvin Coolidge to spend his summer in the Black Hills, and in June 1927 Coolidge, his wife Grace and a retinue of some eighty staff, reporters and Secret Service men moved into the lodge, which became the first Summer White House in the West. Coolidge learned to fish for trout in the creek below the lodge, which now carries Grace Coolidge's name, rode out in a cowboy outfit, and drove each day to an office at the high school in Rapid City.

It was there, on August 2, 1927, that he handed reporters slips of paper reading that he did not choose to run for president in 1928, a sentence that ended speculation about a third term. Eight days later he went up to Mount Rushmore and gave the dedication speech that opened the carving. The lodge is still an inn and restaurant run for the park, and its guests can book the room the Coolidges used.