Historic Rapid City — Historic Rapid City

The Dead have tales to reveal

By Jean Kessloff For The Weekly News

History is dead in Rapid City, dead and buried in the Mountain View and Mount Calvary cemeteries.

And yet it is still alive, alive with the stories of our past and the people of that past. Benjamin Franklin once said “Show me your cemeteries and I will tell you what kind of people you have.”

Cemeteries are a community’s tangible reminder of their past and a unique historic resource. The Rapid City Historic Preservation Commission, in observance of this year’s National Historic Preservation Month, sponsored a program presented by Chuck Rausch of Rausch Monuments about cemeteries to promote public awareness of their importance to a community’s history.

They are an irreplaceable part of our community; an outdoor history museum. They are a genealogical resource as well. Markers reveal clues about family histories that cannot be found in books or databases. Epitaphs and iconography can be clues to religious affiliations, occupations and causes of death.

Cemeteries are also a place to teach the generations to come about the generations of the past — about respect and reverence and the importance of preservation.

Mountain View and Mount Calvary cemeteries are the final resting place of some of our founding fathers and early entrepreneurs. People such as John Brennan, one of our founding fathers who helped lay out the original townsite in late February of 1876, rest there. Thomas Sweeney, a man who came to the area on foot, founded Sweeney Hardware and became a master of advertising. He’s buried here.

People like Fred Feigel and Gustave Schnasse who came here in 1877, were involved with the Rapid City Railway, politics and numerous other activities. There is also the grave of Felix Pozansky, a civic leader who helped plan the first waterworks; Adrian Forrette, an architect, whose works can still be seen throughout the city; Alice Bower Gossage of the Rapid City Journal; Charles Fallon; Ernest Schluening and Charles P. Tittle, all early entrepreneurs from Rapid City’s history who helped the fledgling “Hay Camp” become the Rapid City of today.

There are other people there as well, people from the surrounding area.

The mausoleum of J. C. Sherman, a pioneer who settled in the city of Pactola, now covered by the lake that bears its name, is the Mount Calvary Cemetery.

It’s the only mausoleum in the cemeteries. It stands as a testament to the man and his accomplishments.

There is also the graves of Col. Warren Shedd, who was a Civil War veteran and a member of the Grand Army of the Republic, and Chauncey and Lillie Yellow Robe, the Lakota educator and his wife.

Or the more recent graves of our not so distant past such as the 1968 Rapid City High School cheerleaders killed in a plane crash while coming home from the State A Boys Basketball Tournament, James Didier of Hotel Alex Johnson, and the victims of the 1972 flood, a wound still raw to many in the area.

The people buried there, whether they were involved in community service through their government, their church, the various service organizations or were one of the many private citizens of the city, are all a part of our history. They lived here and worked here, they loved here and they died here.

Mountain View Cemetery began thanks to Alice Bower Gossage who, through her editorials in the Rapid City Journal, called upon the founding fathers to make arrangements for a new cemetery because of the difficulty negotiating the steep incline to the Plateau Cemetery located on what was then called Signal Hill.

David H. Clark’s memorial at Mountain View cemetery supports a large statue of a woman in contemplation. Clark was born in 1855, served as Rapid City mayor in 1888 and died in 1891.

Isaac Chase opened a clothing store in 1894 in what was called the Windsor Block (currently Presidential Pawn on the corner of Seventh and St. Joseph Streets). Today the original facade of Windsor Block is in the process of being restored.

Photos by Andy Jacobs