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Cover of South Dakota History, volume 48 number 4

South Dakota History, Volume 48, Number 4

Volume 48, Number 4 · 6 articles

Early churches and an Aberdeen bakery are featured in the annual historic preservation issue of “South Dakota History,” the quarterly journal of the South Dakota State Historical Society.

In an article entitled “‘In the footsteps of the pioneer’: Ethnic Settlers and Their Churches in Brown County,” Brad Tennant explores ethnic community building in the late 1800s and early 1900s. New immigrants tended to settle together based on their ethnicities, and for many, the church became a central space to gather and create a new community. In Brown County, this connection led to the listing of four churches—Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Welsh—on the National Register of Historic Places. Tennant is a professor of history at Presentation College in Aberdeen.

“Burckhard’s North Side Bakery of Aberdeen: A Community Staple for Four Generations” by Robert J. Couser illustrates the influence that one immigrant family had on the development of the town. German Russian immigrants Paul and Catherine Burckhard opened their Aberdeen bakery in 1906. Over the decades, the Burckhard family adapted their products and practices to keep the business viable into the late 20th century. Couser grew up in Aberdeen and is a former director of the newborn intensive care unit and neonatal research at Minneapolis Children’s Hospital.

An excerpt from “Early Churches in South Dakota: A Lasting Legacy” by Robert W. Sebesta highlights the churches that played a role in the lives of American Indians. Having begun as mission churches, they intended to convert and acculturate those who had known entirely different ways of life. Several of the structures remain in use today. Sebesta grew up in Sioux Falls and taught computer science at the university level for more than 30 years.

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5 of the 6 articles in this issue are free to read below.

In This Issue

  1. "In the footsteps of the pioneer": Ethnic Settlers and Their Churches in Brown County

    by Brad Tennant

    Brad Tennant explores ethnic community building in the late 1800s and early 1900s. New immigrants tended to settle together based on their ethnicities, and for many, the church became a central space to gather and create a new community. In Brown County, this connection led to the listing of four churches—Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish and Welsh—on the National Register of Historic Places. Tennant is a professor of history at Presentation College in Aberdeen. Image to the left is of a picnic at the Savo Township Finnish Lutheran Church.

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  2. BOOK EXCERPT | Early Churches in South Dakota: A Lasting Legacy

    by Robert Sebesta

    Although he did not realize it at the time, Robert W. Sebesta took on a monumental task when he began visiting rural churches around his former home of Yankton, South Dakota, in the early 2000s. His casual interest quickly became a mission to record their existence in photographs, and his collection of images grew as he returned numerous times to explore the entire state, with its varied people, religious denominations, and church architecture. The history of the congregations intrigued him as well, and he set out to create a book that related what he could discover about their past along with a visual record of those churches built before 1930 that survived into the first decades of the 2000s.

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  3. Book Reviews

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  4. Burckhard's North Side Bakery of Aberdeen: A Community Staple for Four Generations

    by Robert J. Couser

    Robert J. Couser illustrates the influence that one immigrant family had on the development of the town. German Russian immigrants Paul and Catherine Burckhard opened their Aberdeen bakery in 1906. Over the decades, the Burckhard family adapted their products and practices to keep the business viable into the late 20th century. Couser grew up in Aberdeen and is a former director of the newborn intensive care unit and neonatal research at Minneapolis Children’s Hospital. Image at left is of Paul and Katherine Burckhard with their children in 1898, shortly after they moved to Aberdeen.

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  5. DAKOTA IMAGES | Henry E. Swander

    Harry E. Swander established a pioneering family-owned bakery in Rapid City that remained in operation for over a century. The Swander Bakery’s historic building still stands as a testament to the vital role of small businesses in the area’s development. Born in Tiffin, Ohio, in July of 1863, Swander received little formal education, leaving school at the age of twelve to work on a local farm. At sixteen, he became a baker’s apprentice in Bedford, Iowa. In 1885, with a meager thirty-seven-dollar investment, he co-founded a bakery in nearby Clarinda. After selling the business, Swander tried his hand at homesteading in Nebraska until financial difficulties drained his savings. He briefly worked as a railroad lineman and then opened a restaurant in Alliance. Swander and his first wife, Viola, married in 1888. The next year they moved to Rapid City and started a small grocery and confectionery shop. Swander Bakery opened as an offshoot of the family business in 1892. The bakery weathered the economic bust that soon followed to become, as a 1915 autobiographical sketch of Swander claimed, “one of the best and largest of its kind in South Dakota.” Following a divorce, he married Clara Patton, owner of the Patton Hotel, and began investing in and operating local hotels. While Swander retained ownership of the bakery, his oldest son Edward took over its management in 1917. In the decade that followed, Swander Bakery opened new locations in Deadwood and Huron. In 1928, the original plant moved into an eleven-thousand-square-foot building at 601 Twelfth Street in Rapid City. An advertisement declared that the new facility made it the state’s largest and “most modern” bakery. Harry Swander, whom the Rapid City Daily Journal remembered as a “pioneer businessman,” died in Rochester, Minnesota, in 1935. Swander Bakery, however, continued to grow. Its Rapid City plant doubled in size after it joined the Quality Bakers of America, a national cooperative, in 1949. The Iowa-based Metz Baking Company bought out Swander Bakery in 1955, but Harry Swander’s younger son Charles remained general manager until retiring in 1970. The building remained an operational bakery until the mid-1990s. In 2001, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places, solidifying its reputation as a local landmark.

  6. Index, Volume 48

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