I was in Pickstown last summer gathering information for a story when Bill Lampman showed me an old newspaper clipping. Even though he’s not a native of the area, Lampman has become a devoted historian of Pickstown, which was built almost overnight to house workers as they labored on the Fort Randall Dam.
This old article described the discovery of a fossilized ancient sea creature called a mosasaur. Excavators working on another local dam in the 1930s discovered the remains as they moved dirt. Such an important paleontological artifact seemed like something that a major museum would want to add to its collection, so I asked if he knew where it was today.
“It’s in the courthouse in Lake Andes,” he told me.
That took me by surprise, so I made a note to check it out for myself. Sure enough, whenever the people of Charles Mix County go to license a car, they walk by a glass case of mosasaur bones.
As amazing as that is, there are plenty of other surprises hiding inside our county courthouses. We toured the state to find them and then wrote a major feature in our March/April 2022 issue.
One of the first courthouses I visited was in Watertown, where a security guard happily led me down a lower-level hallway to a plaque forged using steel from the USS Maine, a Navy ship that sunk in Havana harbor in February 1898, leading to the Spanish-American War. After the ship was salvaged in 1911 and 1912, much of the steel was removed for souvenirs, including 1,000 plaques distributed throughout the country.
The Walworth County courthouse in Selby houses one of South Dakota’s most famous guns. In December of 1909, Bud Stephens used it to kill Dode MacKenzie — son of cattle baron Murdo MacKenzie — in LeBeau. There was bad blood between them, and it erupted into violence when MacKenzie walked into the Angel Bar, where Stephens worked. He claimed self-defense, pleaded not guilty and was acquitted at trial. LeBeau, a small town on the eastern bank of the Missouri River, was among the nation’s busiest cattle shipping centers, but six months later it mysteriously burned to the ground. Many people suspected the influential Murdo MacKenzie had something to do with it, though it was never proven.
Hutchinson County has a brand-new courthouse on the west side of Olivet, but there are two pieces of history inside. The courthouse has long been the repository for championship trophies from the boys and girls county invitational basketball tournaments. The boys tournament began in 1926 and was played nearly every year until 2002. The girls started in 1975 and ended in 2001. Auditor Diane Murtha told me there wasn’t much to bring besides the official records when county offices relocated in November of 2019, but she heard from plenty of old ballplayers making sure the trophies found their new home.
There really is something in every courthouse, from brightly colored murals to Civil War-era cannons. Keep watch the next time you visit your seat of county government. Maybe finding your local curiosity will take the sting out of paying your property taxes.
John Andrews is the editor of South Dakota Magazine, a bi-monthly publication that explores the people and places of our great state. For more information, visit www.southdakotamagazine.com.
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