Stone Marker From Dakotas State Line Now Stands In Pierre

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) — An old stone marker newly on display in Pierre is a monument to the unique connection South Dakota has to North Dakota and vice versa.

It once stood as a sort of sentry, on a picket line with 719 others just like it along the straight-as-an-arrow line between the two states that share the same birthday as well as a border of 360.5 miles, half in and half out of South Dakota.

It stands now since October below the flags outside the state’s Cultural Heritage Center on the hills above Pierre and the Missouri River, about five feet up from the ground, another two feet of the hard quartzite in the ground holding it solid.

It’s 10 inches on each of its four flat sides. On one side is etched SD, on the opposite side is ND and on a third, 260. That’s the mileage, showing it was placed, 123 years ago, splitting the border exactly 260 miles west of Minnesota, about 100.5 miles east of Montana, which would be near Lemmon, S.D.

It was put into the ground about three years after the new states were formed in 1889, dividing Dakota Territory quite evenly. It is one of 720 such markers, seven feet long, 800 pounds of the hard-almost-as-diamond quartzite cut from quarries near Sioux Falls.

In 1891 and 1892, the markers were sunk halfway into the ground.

“They are absolutely indestructible,” said Gordon Iseminger, a distinguished history professor at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks who knows something about durability now in his 53rd year at the school, longer than any other professor.
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“You can take a piece of quartzite and scratch glass just like you can with a diamond.”

Iseminger has walked pretty much the whole 360.5 miles of the border, more than once, fascinated by this one-of-a-kind line between the two states that took 720 stones to mark each half mile from Minnesota to Montana.

He has, in fact, written the book on the markers: “The Quartzite Border,” published in 1988 by Augustana College, his alma mater. Like the flinty monuments, Iseminger has roots in both states. He grew up on a farm near Sioux Falls.

Just this month he gave a lecture in Grand Forks on the markers and knows of this one newly in the public eye in Pierre.

No other states have this, Iseminger said.

“It’s the only state border marked along its entire length,” he told the Capital Journal ( ).

Part of its start was that South Dakota’s first U.S senator, Richard Pettigrew, was a boundless booster of Sioux Falls and the state and of the pinkish quartzite found in nearby quarries which he wanted to introduce to the world.

So he got behind a plan to quarry and install the border markers to illustrate, before much of the land was even surveyed much less settled just a year after the Wounded Knee massacre, where the line was drawn near the 46th parallel. It was mostly a South Dakota deal but North Dakota leaders cooperated, Iseminger said, helping Pettigrew wangle $25,000 in federal funds and helping transport the heavy stones.

Charles Bates was the surveyor who got all the stones moved by steamship, railroad and wagon, his crews spending two years putting them 3.5 feet deep in the mostly untouched prairie.

“He had the monuments for the east half, east of the river, sent by rail to White Rock, Frederick, Eureka and Newark,” Iseminger said. “Those for the west side of the Missouri went by rail to Pierre, then were loaded on steamboats and up to the boundary, about half of them. The rest were taken up to Bismarck on steamboats, shipped by rail to Dickinson (still in North Dakota) and then taken down to the boundary by horse and wagon.”

Putting them in the ground was all hand and horse labor, he said.

All were engraved at the quarry with the states’ initials, the SD for the south side, ND for the north side and the mile number on the east side so you would see it walking west, Iseminger said.

“Except for one, a mistake was made, and the mile number is one the west side.”

It took some precise planning.

After the two-year kind of stone fence post project was completed, Bates “turned in $400” of the federal funds he hadn’t spent, Iseminger said.

Over the years, farmers and ranchers, cattle and water and wind, moved some or pushed them over or nearly buried them. Road builders finally getting around to the area sometimes would just pull one out of the way and leave it in the new ditch. And some people just took them, for lawn ornaments and such, Iseminger said. UND’s earlier history professor Orrin Libby located a couple in probably the 1930s and delivered them to the North Dakota Historical Society where they somehow have been lost since, he said.

“About half of them are still there on the border,” Iseminger said, although he and others, including Jay Vogt, director of the Cultural Heritage Center, say nobody knows for sure and nobody has been checking.

The federal Bureau of Land Management has had ownership and jurisdiction of the markers from the start and has sent out public notices only a few years ago in newspapers across both states making clear it’s a federal crime to take or have one.

Iseminger knows of two stones in Oregon and two in Nebraska and has talked to the people who have them. “They are proud as anything of them and are not going to let them go,” he said.

In 2005, a North Dakota State University football player got in trouble when he brought one of the stones from his family’s ranch near Scranton, N.D., to put on the lawn in front of his campus residence. A deal was worked out for NDSU to display it “as an educational monument,” and charges against the football player were dismissed, BLM officials said.

Vogt said this marker came to his center, brought by persons unknown to him, about eight years ago. It’s been in storage until a good time and place were found for it this past fall, fitting well into the 125th anniversary of the two states Nov. 2.

“It’s really a significant symbol,” Vogt said. “Bates was so accurate in his surveying, to this day people use the markers as a point of reference for surveying.”

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Information from: Pierre Capital Journal,