Emmeline Elliott

Drive down any road in South Dakota, or practically any road in the Midwest for that matter, and you will see abandoned buildings. You might come across an old house sitting in the middle of a pasture with cows grazing around it. Or it might be a barn that seems like it sprung up by itself in the middle of a soybean field. The questions of who once inhabited them and why are they abandoned inspired the book Skeletons of the Prairie: Abandoned Rural Codington County, South Dakota.

Codington County Historical Society Director Tim Hoheisel will present a slide show of Skeletons of the Prairie at the Madison Area Arts Council’s White Night festival Friday at 6 p.m. in the historic Lawrence Welk Opera House at Prairie Village. This program is sponsored by the South Dakota Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities and is free and open to the public.

Released by the Historical Society in 2000, the book began as a project by the Codington County Historic Preservation Commission to document and catalog, through photography, all the abandoned houses, barns, and other structures in Codington County, South Dakota, before they are all gone. Once the Historic Preservation Commission finished their work, taking photographs of more than 100 different buildings amounting to more than 1,000 photographs, Hoheisel thought a book would be a natural next step.

“Our mission at the Codington County Historical Society is to preserve, interpret, and disseminate the heritage of Codington County. The photographs preserve the buildings, the text interprets the history, and publishing a book disseminates the information to everybody. A project as important as this just had to be accessible to as many people as possible,” Hoheisel said. “The book is important to our local history because it documents something that will be gone in a few years; something that we will never see again.”

Professional photographer S. Paul Tuszynski took all of the photographs. His photographs capture the light and shadow of each barn, house, silo, or other abandoned structure, to create a specific emotion for each picture. Watertown writer Ried Holien wrote the text to accompany the photos and bring the buildings back to life. Hoheisel describes the book as part history, part poetry, part literature and part art. The book also has a forward written by South Dakota State University English professor emeritus and poet laureate of South Dakota David Allan Evans.

According to Hoheisel, who also serves as the Outreach Director of the Center for Western Studies at Augustana College, it is important to preserve these abandoned buildings because they are a tangible link to our past. These abandoned buildings tell the tale of early pioneer settlement into Dakota Territory and later South Dakota

The hardcover book is 160 pages long and contains more than 200 full color photographs.

Other White Night activities include live music, poetry readings, a theater performance, a train ride and arts and crafts opportunities. A full schedule of White Night events is posted here on our blog and www.facebook.com/madisonareaartscouncil.