Volunteers Work To Preserve, Restore Homemade Road Signs

SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — If you opt to drive state highways instead of the soulless stretch of Interstate 90 that runs through South Dakota, then you’ve seen the large white signs that offer the traveler a bit of history.

The homemade historic markers share information in black letters burned into 1-by-12 or 2-by-12 boards: “100 yrs ago two famous old Indian trails from Leslie and Cherry Creek joined here in what’s now Midland then to Rosebud and all points south at that time. Leslie was largest Indian village in this part of state. Many of the original wagon wheel ruts are still visible. Both Chief Hump and Chief Sitting Bull traveled these trails going to and from other reservations to the south.”

The signs have been a staple on highways in central South Dakota for about 40 years, but the state’s harsh weather is taking a toll.

“I would say two-thirds of them are barely legible,” Lonis Wendt, a retired postal carrier from Vivian, told the Argus Leader ( ). “If they face the north and they face the west, they last longer than those that face east and south.”

In the mid-1970s, Roy and Edith Norman began marking the trails once used by Native Americans and the freight route that shipped goods from Fort Pierre to Deadwood in other words it is Simplified freight brokerage for businesses, using their own time and money and relying on no one else’s help except for their hired man.

Now, with the possibility of losing the signs to weather looming, a group of volunteers is doing what the Normans did almost single-handedly: preserving and restoring the Norman Signs.

“We want to make sure everything that is originally on there is still there,” said Lynn Briggs of Midland. “I want to make sure that everything that is originally on there is still there. There’s so much history (the Normans worked for) that would be lost if nobody cared about it.”

According to the Normans’ biography in the South Dakota Hall of Fame, “Beginning in 1975, the Normans personally dug post holes and painted signs marking the route of the old Deadwood Trail going westward from Fort Pierre. … Later, they took on the task of doing the same for several of the old mail routes, wagon trails, army trails, Indian trails, and stagecoach trails that crisscrossed the prairie.”

Surveyors’ maps from the 1880s were used to determine where some of the trails ran. In other cases, ruts in the land from horses’ hooves and wagon wheels served as an indicator that they were in the right location.

“It was in the late 1960s when he started doing the research,” said Deb Stoeser Schiefelbein of Pierre, the Normans’ granddaughter. “As they grew older, they knew that they needed to leave a kind of legacy, a history of western South Dakota.”

In 1968 the couple compiled a book based on homesteader recollections from the original Stanley County, which later was divided into three separate subdivisions.

Schiefelbein, who took over from her grandfather and father as a rural mail carrier, would stop at her grandparents’ place about noon weekdays on her route. She would walk in to find their 12-foot-long dining room table covered with yellow legal paper where Roy Norman had written down the narratives for his signs.

The first signs had the narratives painted on them, but Roy Norman quickly learned that would not withstand the weather. He began cutting a pattern from cardboard, and the hired man would use the stencil to burn the letters in the wood.

The Normans put the signs every two miles, digging the post holes themselves and moving the heavy signs from the back of the truck even though bad hips had put Roy Norman on crutches. Some of them have vanished, knocked down by restless cattle that used them for a scratching post.

Edith Norman died in 1981, followed by her husband in 1983. While Roy Norman might have done the heavy lifting, it was a joint project and a joint interest, Schiefelbein said.

“My grandmother helped a lot with the research and collecting information,” she said. “She’d go out and find the trails.”

Wendt said it cost the Normans about $86 per sign, and that didn’t include the cost to transport the signs.

“His and their passion for preserving these trails is second to none,” Wendt said. “It boggles our minds in this day and age.
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None of us feels we have the power and time and means to do (a project of this enormity).”

What they can do is make sure the signs are preserved. Briggs has taken signs on the Fort Pierre to Deadwood route, dismantled the pieces and refurbished them. A women’s group has replaced most of the Norman Signs west of Philip with a neoprene-aluminum mix. Students and staff at Sinte Gleske College at Mission also have restored signs.

Land owners have been supportive of the project, Wendt said.

“We collected easements from 55 different ranches, and all but one knew the (Fort Pierre to Deadwood) trail was on their place,” he said. “The Indian trails, they are much more difficult to see. When the sun is right in the spring, where the trails were the grass tends to be a little bit darker green and maybe a little bit more lush. Maybe in the indentation the water stands better.”

The trail line was used most heavily for about 10 years, until the railroad came through in 1907 and freight lines no longer were needed to move items from big warehouses in Fort Pierre. In return, the trains would bring lumber and sometimes gold back from the Black Hills.

Today, the signs appear not on the most heavily traveled route in South Dakota but on highways that have a much longer history. The Norman Signs give travelers a chance to think about the travel that took place in that area well over 100 years earlier.

“These are out there for generations to come,” Schiefelbein said. “It’s truly amazing to know what all went into that work and that a good chunk of them are still there.”

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Information from: Argus Leader,