A memorial’s abandonment says a lot about society. Hopefully its rescue does, too.

Craig Hall, of Dean Kurtz Construction, uses a Bierschbach Equipment and Supply telehandler to move the original Alice Gossage Memorial on May 29, 2024. (Seth Tupper/South Dakota Searchlight)

RAPID CITY — Volunteerism may not move mountains, but today it rescued a memorial from a mountainside.

The memorial is for Alice Gossage , a pioneering journalist, businesswoman and philanthropist who was one of Rapid City’s first residents in the 1880s.

She ran the Rapid City Journal and wrote a column for many years while the newspaper’s founder — her husband, Joe Gossage — was often ill. She also operated a “Sunshine Room,” where she distributed clothing and other items to the poor. Her leadership and generosity during the city’s formative years earned her the nickname “mother of Rapid City.”

After she died, some of her admirers selected a site atop a mountain ridge above the city and raised money to erect a roughly 4-foot-tall concrete memorial to Gossage, which they dedicated in 1938. The Rapid City Journal described it as the highest point around, offering views of “Rapid City to the east, Cowboy hill to the north, western Rapid valley to the west, and to the south the Harney range of the Black Hills.”

It says a lot about Alice Gossage that people trekked all the way to that spot — about 500 feet higher than the young city below — to memorialize her.

And it says a lot about the treatment of women in history that the memorial was shoved aside for a television broadcast tower about 20 years later.

Incredibly, the memorial remained there, lying on its side behind that tower, abandoned, forgotten and deteriorating, for the last 67 years.

Until today, that is, when volunteers used a telehandler to pluck the memorial and its footing — estimated to weigh a combined 9,000 pounds — from the side of the ridge. It’ll stay in storage for a while as preparations are made to place it permanently in the front yard of the Journey Museum , with a walkway and an interpretive sign.

The effort to rescue the memorial began with its rediscovery in 2019. Local history buff Pat Roseland came across a 1930s-era picture of the memorial in all its original glory. He’d never heard of it and wondered what happened to it.

He and fellow history buff Jean Kessloff did some research and located the memorial. I was a reporter at the Rapid City Journal at the time; they called me, and I wrote a story about the memorial and its fate.

I got help from Mark Slocum at the Black Hills Historical Society , which has a trove of historical documents related to the memorial. From those documents, and from Journal newspaper clippings and county real estate records, we pieced together the story of the memorial’s demise.

The land for the memorial was donated by a local man. The city built Skyline Drive up to the memorial site, but the winding and high-elevation road promptly fell into disrepair. In 1947, the Journal reported that the road was “blocked off” and “growing up to weeds.” In other words, the memorial was accessible only by a strenuous hike.

The son of the original landowner successfully sued to get the memorial land back, based on the city’s failure to care for it. Then, in the 1950s, he apparently participated in a three-way deal: He gave the land to the Black Hills Historical Society, the society sold the land to a local company, and the company built a tower on it for a new television station. The society, which was then known as the Minnilusa Historical Association, was raising money for a building addition.

To retain some kind of memorial to Gossage, the society took the bronze sundial and plaque from the original memorial and slapped it onto a stone-and-mortar pedestal in Rapid City’s Halley Park (the sundial was a tribute to Gossage’s Sunshine Room). That pedestal still stands as a pale shadow of the gleaming concrete structure that once overlooked the city from high on Skyline Drive.

After publishing my story, I accepted a few invites from community groups to give a talk about the memorial. One of those talks got the attention of Johnny Sundby, a friend and journalistic collaborator of mine who owns Johnny Sundby Photography and serves on the Black Hills Historical Society board.

How to help

Donations toward a walkway and signage at the future site of the Alice Gossage Memorial are being accepted by the Black Hills Historical Society at bhhistoricalsociety.org , by mail at 222 New York St., Rapid City, SD 57701, or by calling Mark Slocum at (605) 394-6099.

Johnny formed a committee of concerned citizens and obtained permission from Keloland Media Group — which now operates the broadcast tower — to access the site. Bierschbach Equipment & Supply donated the use of a telehandler, which Kasey Kurtz and Craig Hall, of Dean Kurtz Construction, used to do the precarious work of plucking the old memorial from the mountainside. They moved it to their shop, where they’ll prepare it to be placed upright again.

The Rapid City Parks and Recreation Department has done some dirt work to prep the site at the Journey. Frontier Construction & Renovation is ready to donate its labor for a concrete walkway around the memorial, and the Black Hills Historical Society is raising money to pay for the walkway materials and interpretive signage. The original bronze sundial and plaque will also be placed on the memorial with the help of James Van Nuys, a living relative of Gossage.

The memorial came off the hillside in one piece. It’s weathered, and its new location won’t be nearly as scenic as a mountaintop. But at least it’ll be right-side-up and no longer out of sight.

When then-Mayor Robert Hill dedicated the memorial in 1938, he spoke of Gossage and said, “The community owes a debt to such a person.”

Rapid City has been in default on that debt for almost seven decades. Hopefully the rescue of the memorial is a down payment.

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