South Dakota Prairie Homestead Gets Historic Designation

SCENIC, S.D. (AP) — It began as a love story in Czechoslovakia in the early 1900s, he the son of landowners, she a neighbor of a different class, forbidden from marrying by the mores of the day.

More than 110 years later, the prairie homestead east of Scenic established by Josef and Marie Kudrna and tended by three successive generations of the Kudrna family, has been named to the National Register of Historic Places.

When their lingering love blossomed, Josef and Marie could not have known where their hearts would take them, but they knew they had to be together. So, to the consternation of their parents, the two boarded a cargo ship in 1903 with 30 other Czechs and Russians, bound for the brave New World of America.

“They got on a ship and got married, either on the ship or shortly after they arrived at Ellis Island,” said Shirley Kudrna, the wife of Donald “Sonnie” Kudrna, Josef and Marie’s grandson. “They couldn’t get married over there, so they decided they would wait.”

Soon after arriving in the U.S., the Kudrnas set out for Milwaukee, where Josef would toil for the next seven years with 10,000 other workers building train cars for the Milwaukee Railroad. The couple had three daughters while living in Wisconsin, then learned of one of the largest land giveaways in the history of their new country.

In early 1910, Josef set out for the vast expanses of western South Dakota, dead set on acquiring a piece of ground where he could move his family. Through a lottery, he quickly acquired, then “proved up” a 160-acre plot 6.5 miles east of Scenic, frequently traveling between Milwaukee and South Dakota to make the needed improvements on the property he would one day call his own, Shirley explained.

Marie followed Josef to South Dakota in June 1910, with their three daughters in tow. Their lone son, Anthony “Tony,” was born in 1916, right on their growing ranch. Marie soon laid claim to 200 additional acres and the couple worked from dawn past dusk to establish a ranching enterprise.

“It’s amazing the hardships people went through in those days,” Sonnie told the Rapid City Journal ( ). “Today, electricity, like the one serviced by an industrial electrician, powers washing machines and refrigerators and ranges. It wasn’t that way then.”

And Sonnie, 70, who has spent his entire life on the ranch settled by his grandparents, would know.

“I can remember when we didn’t have electricity, when we hauled our drinking water, and when we had a wind charger to charge our batteries up before electricity arrived in the 1950s,” Sonnie said. “I was 7 years old before I even went to Rapid City. It was so different then. I had been to Scenic and Imlay, but most of the time the folks went to town and we stayed home and did chores.”

On a recent Thursday, Tony reminisced about his life on the ranch and his service to his country in World War II. Sitting in his kitchen 100 feet from the sod house in which he was born, he paused to watch a herd of bison run past his kitchen window. He still recalls protecting Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1941, when MacArthur arrived in Australia, the island nation where Tony was assigned to assist the Army Corps of Engineers in building runways.

Never married, Tony said he “tried a couple of times,” but it never worked out. His family has been known to rib him, telling Tony he could probably credit his long life to never having been lured into nuptials.

A few years ago, Sonnie, Shirley and their aging uncle Tony discussed selling the ranch. Sonnie said he was unable to afford buying out his uncle’s share, so the trio elected to put it on the market.

“My uncle was 97 years old at the time, and I was 68 and had had a heart bypass in 2010,” he said. “We didn’t have any kids, and Tony never married, so we thought it was time to sell.”

When a Boston buyer, partnered with Black Hills buffalo rancher and best-selling author Dan O’Brien, put in an acceptable bid on the 3,400-acre ranch in the fall of 2012, the trio thought it over. When the potential buyers said Tony could live out his life at the only home he had ever known, it clinched the deal. Sonnie and Shirley retained 190 acres of the ranch, on which they built a new house.

Nonetheless, parting ways with a ranch that was first settled by his grandparents and tended by three generations of Kudrnas was not an easy decision, Sonnie said.

“It was hard to give it up,” he said with a sigh. “It’s all I had ever done, work on this ranch. But, I can see it every day from where we live now so that helped a bunch. And, when they said Tony could stay on the place for life, we thought that was a good deal.”

When nationally recognized South Dakota author O’Brien, who penned, “Wild Idea: Buffalo and Family in a Difficult Land,” toured the property, he said he knew it was special. In fact, the Kudrna ranch was one of three properties in western South Dakota his partner, Vin Ryan of Conata Ranch LLC, purchased simultaneously, he said.

“When we found this ranch, we knew it was something worth cherishing, worth saving,” O’Brien said from his own ranch on the Cheyenne River east of Hermosa. “Homesteading and the history of ranching is something worth celebrating, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

“We are believers in large landscape buffalo production,” added O’Brien, the co-owner of Rapid City’s Wild Idea Buffalo Co., which raises and buys grass-fed bison, harvests the animals in the field, then sells the high-quality meat via the Internet. “When you live out there for 100 years, that’s interesting to me and, of course, I write about stuff like that. People 50 years from now will not have an inkling about this type of lifestyle. But, if they go out there they might get a hint of it.”

O’Brien thought the ranch so special, he got his partners to hire University of Chicago graduate student Sarah Brey to spearhead an effort to place the property on the National Register of Historic Places. When the owners attracted the attention of officials with the South Dakota State Historical Society, who subsequently visited the ranch, they found they shared an affinity for the homestead.

“The Kudrna ranch is a great example of a successful homestead in an area where many, many homesteads failed,” said Chris Nelson, a specialist with the South Dakota State Historic Preservation Office. “It’s a story of survival.

“It also demonstrates how subsistence homesteading grew into diversified farms, but then transitioned in the West River country into the predominately livestock operations we see today,” Nelson added.

The Kudrna Homestead and Ranch was one of seven South Dakota sites recently added to the National Register of Historic Places. The National Register is the official federal list of properties identified as important in American history, architecture, archaeology, engineering and culture, Nelson noted. Buildings, sites, structures and objects at least 50 years old that have historical significance might qualify for the National Register, he said.

“South Dakota’s history is rich in American Indian culture, pioneer life and change,” Jay D. Vogt, state historic preservation officer and director of the State Historical Society, said in a prepared release announcing the designation. “Properties listed on the National Register are important for their role in South Dakota’s culture and heritage. And when properties get listed, it shows that their owners take pride in their role in preserving that history.”

Perhaps no one in western South Dakota takes more pride in their property than the descendants of two long-ago young Czechoslovakian lovers who defied the odds, sailed the seas, married, then traveled to America’s Outback to begin a new life.

Amid the scattered houses, barns, garages and granary on the Kudrna homestead, not far from the simple sod shanty where Josef and Marie first lived a century ago, a bronze plaque tells the story of a couple who braved all for a shared dream and left in their wake a lasting legacy for all who followed in their footsteps.

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Information from: Rapid City Journal,