Wall Drug

In 1931 Ted Hustead, a pharmacist from Nebraska, and his wife Dorothy bought the drugstore in Wall, a town of a few hundred people on the dry northern rim of the Badlands. For five years, through drought and the Depression, almost no one came in. On a hot afternoon in 1936 Dorothy, kept awake by the cars passing on the highway to the Black Hills, decided that what those drivers wanted was a cold drink of water, and the Husteads put up hand-lettered signs offering free ice water at Wall Drug. Travelers turned off the road that summer and kept turning off.

The signs multiplied. Wall Drug billboards spread along the highways for hundreds of miles in every direction, and the store grew room by room until it filled most of a block, with a cafe, a chapel, a gallery of western art, a jackalope to sit on and animated cowboys singing in the back. The family still runs it.

It is easy to sneer at, and travelers have been doing it for ninety years on their way in the door. But the ice water is still free, the coffee still costs a nickel, and the store sits eight miles from the Badlands Loop Road and the nearest services for a long way in either direction.