This is a production of SDPB It's a real quiet environment.

That's the one thing I like about it, at the same time since I live about a mile out of town.

It's even quieter.

The animosity was between the school sports teams.

Big rivalry between Newell and Vale.

When I meet people from somewhere else in the state and I say I'm from Newell, South Dakota.

They say, "Oh, the home of the Irrigators!"

Join our crew as we meet the people of Newell.

For a little town, it's very colorful.

We had a lot of characters.

Greetings from Newell, South Dakota and the Newell Sheep Yards.

Greetings from Newell, South Dakota.

Greetings from Newell.

Greetings from Prairie Lane Farm from Newell, South Dakota.

Greeting from Newell.

Greetings from Newell, South Dakota.

Greetings from Newell, South Dakota and the Newell Museum.

Gateway to the Black Hills.

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Welcome to Dakota Life, and greetings from Newell.

I'm your host, Tim Davison.

Join me and the crew as we explore this community that's been shaped by water and is rooted in agriculture.

But beyond the scenes we see today, there's a history that lay dormant just over the horizon.

Mato Paha is considered a sacred place where the Great Spirit communicates with the people and is a dwelling place for the spirits.

The Lakota name, Mato Paha, reflects the mountain's resemblance to a sleeping bear.

For thousands of years, the people who called the Plains home would visit what we know today as Bear Butte.

But in the mid 1800s, the bison their lives relied on were replaced by another hooved animal.

Cowboys from Texas pushed their herds into the area from the south and onto the reservation, taking advantage of this valuable food source that is held in high regard to this day.

But a different, valuable commodity brought outsiders en mass to the area.

In the 1870s.

Well, my grandfather came to the United States in 1872, and he was a bull whacker on the Fort Pierre Deadwood Trail, and there was no railroad access into the Black Hills, into the mining areas at Deadwood.

And so most of the mining equipment and food supplies and clothing and all of those things came to the Black Hills over the overland trails by those great wagons.

A bull whacker was a guy that had about 20 bulls, steers, and they would pull three freight wagons.

The reason they use those oxen instead of horses and mules was that the oxen, they weren't really harnessed up.

They just had hand that yoke and so they could graze as they walked.

They didn't have to carry grain like they did for horses.

You had to worry about cactus, rattlesnakes, and Indians at that time.

That made that kind of a dangerous trip.

An interesting job, hard, hard work.

You know, they would walk the entire way to 180 miles and make that round trip in about 30 days.

Soon, that 30 day round trip could be completed in just one.

And when the gold rush ended, some decided to turn their sights towards the golden prairie north of the Black Hills.

"To the Honorable Secretary of the Interior, Washington, D.C.

- A matter of reclaiming arid lands.

We, the undersigned citizens of the United States, residents of Butte County, South Dakota, a location lying north of the Belle Fourche River, from which at least 100,000 acres of agricultural land can be irrigated and reclaimed both by the flood waters of the adjacent hills and also by a canal from the Belle Fourche River.

Said reservoir could be cheaply made by the construction of a dam composed of earthwork.

About six miles of canal will tap the river.

Signed, about 200 citizens.

April 1903.

You know, most towns grow up where you have somebody moves to an area and decides to start a store, and then people started accumulating around that and Newell was the opposite of that.

The U.S.

Reclamation Service started building Orman Dam.

It was government land.

So they set aside the townsite for Newell declared that that was the headquarters of the irrigation project.

It was designated nineteen-three already to be the headquarters, like Vale was, "Star the Project."

Nisland was the, "Hub of the Project."

And, Newell was the, "Headquarters of the Project" because it was.

Planning the proposed dam and canal system brought engineers and workers from across the United States.

Plans included the future town of Newell, which was named after Frederick Haynes Newell, lead engineer on the project.

Once plans were finalized, years of backbreaking work started.

[sound of distant workers and horses] They first went in there and dug a trench, got all of the topsoil, the grass and weeds, and dug it down.

And then they dug the pilings, long posts in there, and that's what's under that dam to keep it from moving.

Then they put dirt on there and they would pack it.

In these diaries it mentions they had the winds like we have.

They came back to work the next day to work on the face, and three feet of dirt was had blown away.

So they had to rebuild that whole face again.

They had a eight car train on the south side of the dam and a ten car train on the north side, but they had these Vulcan steam shovels, they were called, they'd load those cars, and those cars were side dumped.

And so they'd bring them up on the dam, and they'd put on six inches of dirt and they'd pack that.

And then where Owl Creek goes right through where the dam is, they left that gap open because they had a trestle across there first to get their train across.

And then when they were ready, then they filled in and they were worried about erosion on the face of the dam.

So they built these concrete blocks that were like eight foot square, and then they would cover them with dirt.

And so they had damp dirt and they left them, let em cure for 30 days.

Then they put them on the face of the dam.

And so the whole face of that dam was concrete blocks.

They got some big waves, big wind, that washed some of those blocks loose.

And so then they put those great big rocks in there.

You know, when they built Orman Dam, it was the second largest city, that community, just below the dam, the second largest city in South Dakota.

Because of all the workers that worked in that dam, as the dam began to take shape, so did the network that would eventually carry water directly to farmers across the area.

I am amazed at the canal system and the laterals and the sub laterals that they flow with the engineering abilities that they had in 1905 or 4, when they started, to what we have today and it's still works and it's amazing.

You know, they have a North Canal and South Canal on the North Canal is a lot bigger and serves more acres.

Flood irrigation, You open the gate and let her go and guide the water to where it needed to be.

We have all these series of ditches and canals to the whole system.

Eleven was when they first turned in the South Canal because it was completed, and then the next year the North Canal and then there, this north side, first year, 1911, was also a drought.

And so the only ones who had crop was the South Canal.

People.

They had hay, they had everything and boy could they sell.

And then the next year, of course, in 1912 way, then the North Canal was open.

It was the biggest earthen dam in the world at that time.

And then from here, since it was success, they went to Denver and Fort Peck came right next up in Montana Bureau of Reclamation just started popping them up because this was such a success.

Our fathers would just croak if they saw this, "What they got pivots out here now?!"

As water started to flow into the area, so too did the people.

There was a there was a big boom in this area about nineteen-nine.

Where they were releasing government land for homesteading.

Yeah, they were trying to get people out here to settle and get more money in the coffers, you know, and pay for all these projects and this is was the desert.

And it was.

Train was here before Newell was was, too.

That's what brought the people out.

And they came in immigrant cars to the train.

They didn't give you free transportation on the train to get out here to look this over.

The free land or the cheap land, and then the water for irrigation brought them out here because once you put water on here, you can grow stuff even though it's terrible soil.

Well, the joke is, "you stick with it, it'll stick with you when it rains."

[Laughs] It's a heavy clay.

And so you get these.

A lot of them were immigrants that came from somewhere else.

But some of them weren't farmers, you know, and they had to learn how to do this.

And that experiment farm really helped that.

While the Bureau of Reclamation worked on the irrigation project, the U.S.

Department of Agriculture brought in top agronomists from around the country and started the Bell Fourche Experiment Farm just outside of the Newell townsite.

People that came here had no experience, relatively speaking, with irrigation, and so they really didn't know what crops were suitable and how to irrigate.

And so the the experiment farm was a really popular thing because they started helping develop the crops that were profitable and then and then teaching people how to irrigate, for example, they used to have, an annual picnic at the Experiment Farm, and they'd get a thousand people to come to the picnic.

They did a lot of experiments with feeding sheep and how to feed lambs.

And and they did some terracing of, the land area to irrigate.

You know, it was really helpful to the development of the area.

And after everything was settled and the irrigation was in place, irrigation project, just about every farmer raised sugar beets at one time, and they had started as early as, like 1916, of trying to raise some sugar beets in the area and figured out that this was the right climate.

It took a lot of thinning first and then weeding, then eventually harvesting, and then the leaves, too.

Well, they can't have the leaves, so they have to cut the tops off.

And that was just backbreaking work.

Farmers brought in beets by the wagon load.

They were paid by the pound.

After all the dirt was shaken loose from the load.

They built the sugar factory, U and I. That's Utah and Idaho Sugar Company built the factory.

That was 1927.

They completed the factory.

And that's when this area really boomed then for a while, for many years.

Each high school had a different mascot.

And being irrigation why, way back in the 20s already, they started calling the Irrigators, and then the beet diggers and the Mustangs changed theirs to Mustang from Beet Topper.

Newell's heavy clay gumbo soil isn't ideal for some crops, but for one area export it produces some of the best in the world.

[distant sound of shears] [...baahhhhh...] It produces very good wools.

This is more a gumbo type of soil down here around Newell, up where I am.

I'm on the sand.

And, they both do really well for sheep.

And the lambs do very well too.

I bring my lambs in here to Newell the second week of October.

They're not even five months old yet, but my main bunch weighs around 90 pounds every year, so the lambs do really, really well in this country.

Yeah, they say sheep herding is the second oldest profession in the world.

I won't tell you what the first is but [..laughter..] Ahh, It's been since the Earth was created.

There's been sheep and there's been people who tend to their flocks.

And we try to do it, too.

And Barney works really hard to try to get everybody top dollar.

So we're very thankful about that.

The sheep start coming in on Wednesdays actually.

And we do it a little different here where we sort em and weigh em off the truck.

And Thursdays at 1:00 we run through the auction ring.

Back in the 90s we had 23,000. sell in one day.

And it took us seven hours to sell em.

It's because the stories like that and the annual Newell Ram Sale that this small town earned the title of the Nation's Sheep Capital.

There was a lot bigger bunches.

There was one guy trailed em in from Vale.

He trailed in, 3700 yearling ewes.

And we sorted em up into three different bunches, there were a lot of buyers, people wanting them, you know, and ah, somebody bought.

Bought, the person that got the last bid.

He just took them all.

And how you coulda seen the mouths drop.

How about it when he did that.

A lot of buyers went home without ewes, that day.

A lot of them now are bought over the internet and all of the sheep from here go to Texas and Colorado and Iowa, Minnesota, all over Wyoming, and all over.

Yeah they go all over the United States actually.

People utilizing what we raise I mean all is most environmentally friendly fabric.

There is all you need is sheep grow it.

They grow crop every year.

And it's flame retardant odor resistant or keep you cool in summer heat.

Believe it or not.

Back in the 40s and 50s, even quite a ways into the 60s, that was kind of the golden age of the sheep industry.

And of course, I didn't get in on that.

But, I think we lost our wool incentive program in about 94, I would say.

And we hit some pretty tough times.

And that's what a lot of sheep herders exited the business.

But the diehards are still in.

I would say 90% of all these ranches that were homesteaded paid for the ranches of sheep.

A lot of guys went to cows now, but they all started with sheep.

These ranges out in this country were almost perfect, for sheep didn't have a lot of timber, you know, and many of that.

And the sheep just did great grazing out on these open ranges.

And they were easy to get started into.

If you had just little capital and little try to get into sheep, that just made it work.

And with the families around here been doing it for generations and generations, we hope to keep it going.

Just like the sheep industry has changed over the years, so too has building that houses the Newell Museum.

Producer Jaxon Thorson takes us there to see one of its most unique collections.

Newell City Hall was built in 1913 under Edward Bushnell for less than $20,000.

It started out as his repair shop, but throughout the years has housed apartments, a city jail, a dance hall, and a firehouse.

Today, all the staples of a town's museum.

But what's upstairs will surprise you.

These are ollllld stairs.

For 30 years, Linda Velder has curated a variety of artifacts and exhibits for the museum throughout each and every room, there's one type of item that seems to stand out.

Well, we get dolls, collections from estates or from everyone that's cleaning out their garage or attic, downsizing, moving to apartments.

And that's how we get a lot of these dolls.

They aren't from one person's collection, although a lot of them are.

She was the doll lady in town.

She made the dolls and took in all kinds of dolls.

And this is one way this collection here, except for these.

Along the bottom.

She was collected Barbie dolls, special editions of Barbie dolls, and very old dolls.

These are like a paper maché original clothing painted on.

I think they'd be from the late 1800s.

Yeah, because they don't make anything like that anymore.

Yeah, and then little dolls, big dolls.

Cutesy dolls.

Oh, here's, This Alka Seltzer guy, even.

Combination dolls.

He might have a rubber head, but they might have a cloth bodice or wood or some of his.

Kind of, like, pressed.

Sawdust.

And then they press it and shape it in, you know, glue it shape shaping into a leg or an arm, and then they could paint it, flesh colored or whatever it is.

There's some of them are famous people like, that was an ice skater there.

And here's another one I just yeah, this is another famous doll.

I think she was a movie star when she was little.

Oh, I was mentioning the topsy turvy.

Those and this would be Red Riding Hood and the grandma here.

They're they're just different.

It's just tell a story and.

Oh, this one here, that might be the other one.

I was talking about.

Aunt Jemima they have on what they have on when they come in.

Some still have the original clothing and others just whatever they had on.

And this is sleepy babies, babies that are look like they're sleeping or, you know, little newborns or something.

And then there again, the old grandmas get pretty excited over this.

But like I say, we'd be all in jail because, baby, you get caught in there.

Now, as you could see.

And then this is just a rocking chair or whatever was more dolls.

I just stick them wherever I can, you know, because everybody knows I'll take most anything.

In fact, I do take everything.

And while the doll collection itself is extensive, there's also thousands of accessories, pictures, teapots, vases over here, Raggedy Ann and Andy.

That's quite a big collection.

These are celluloid dolls.

They're a forerunner to a kind of plastic.

They're celluloid.

So you touch them, they dance, and you can't get it out.

Holly Hobbie oh... That's, ahh.. everything's better with blue bonnet on it and then Bluebonnet girl.

Yeah, these are concrete.

And I think they used to sit out by the gatepost or something.

You can either Have a flag in there or a lantern or some little ornament hanging.

But they're having a tea party.

These are big.

They call them play pal dolls because they're, 5 or 6 year old child.

Come play with them.

Learn to walk along with them.

This is her friend.

And these are kind of China dolls here.

They're those are kind of like a trio of some kind.

Yeah.

Just like I said before, it's probably overkill on dolls, but they all got different little faces.

They're doing different things.

Clothing is.

Just a city hall has been reinvented over the years.

So too has a historic farm that we mentioned earlier in the show, producer Jason Andera takes us to see what's growing there today.

There's a ray of green at the edge of Newell, where rows of lettuce float quietly on pools of nutrient rich water.

This land, once home to a historic Federal experimental farm, is once again pushing the boundaries of what's possible in agriculture.

I still feel very much.

It's an experimental farm.

That's that's what I feel very much where we're experimenting all the time.

Seems like, some things work and some things don't.

Back in 1907, the Bureau of Reclamation established the original experimental farm to research crops and train young people in modern farming practices.

Today, more than a century later, the tradition of experimentation continues.

Only now the plants don't touch the soil.

This is hydroponic farming, a method of growing plants in water rather than soil.

So yeah, I'm not sure if I know exactly what the what.

Hydroponic got some.

I don't know if I ever looked it up in the dictionary, but I know what it means to me, I suppose.

Just, growing plants on water without without fish, that's my definition.

So we just we just use water soluble fertilizers, and dissolve them into the, into the water and circulate them and add ambient oxygen into the, into the water to keep it alive.

And then the plants, the plants thrive in that In the operation's, 23,000 gallon tanks, the plant's roots dangle directly into oxygenated, nutrient rich water.

No dirt.

And the advantages are clear.

Yeah.

Those, fewer insects and, weed pressure.

Of course, there's no weeds in there.

It's clean to clean product.

We still encourage people to wash it.

It's a, it's a chemical free product.

So we're not spraying any anything that's not OMRI listed on our on our plants.

I mean, we obviously have to control some bugs or some get in here.

If things get out of hand, we use, we use more.

But everything is OMRI listed.

Organic products.

Hydroponics also allow year round production and less labor than traditional farming.

But as Rod the farmer behind this venture points out, it's not without risk.

We do pray, that's for sure.

I think I pray both ways that a hailstorm would just take this building away.

Or, or pray that it would just go around us this time.

The first thing that comes to my mind is it looks easy.

I'm not saying it's hard, but I will say that that, there's something always comes up, like.

So we do.

We do, nutrient analysis, every 2 or 3 weeks, probably.

And do, a nutrient adjustment in the water in the pools.

We try to keep that as close to perfect as we can.

Rod grew up dairy farming and working construction in Pennsylvania.

In 2019, he and his family moved to South Dakota looking for a fresh start.

And they've fallen in love with Newell.

Oh yeah, we love it.

Yeah.

No, we we enjoy it very, very much.

Now, instead of raising dairy cows, rod supplies fresh, nutrient dense South Dakota grown greens.

I think it's important for the nutrient dense product.

If you if you want to look at it that way, like it's a nutritious it's a nutritious lettuce, probably compared to I mean, we've never done the we've never done a nutrient analysis, in our lettuce versus an iceberg that I've heard that iceberg lettuce doesn't have a lot of nutrients to it.

But no, I, I think it's important, most importantly is I need the community for this, for even this to work for us.

Rod planned to leave his construction business behind in Pennsylvania.

But ironically, it never fully left his life.

He used his skills to build the hydroponic structures, and now he's tackling an even bigger project saving Newell's grocery store.

We heard that they were wanting to close their doors.

I just thought, well, surely somebody will keep it open and needs to stay open because we need we need the grocery store here in town.

I I've been talking to my wife before that much.

She said, well, we we've got enough, you know, we've got enough on our hands, which is true.

But then we kept we kept talking about it and it sounded like there, there obviously was nobody that was going to take it over.

And it was I'm going to close the store beginning, end of, end of June he said, I think so I went and talked to them beginning of May and, yeah, became a little more interested and thought maybe it's something that we could, if there's enough of help in the area that wants to help out, maybe we can.

Maybe we can keep it a grocery store.

So the next time you're in Newell, you can witness a fresh approach to agriculture and pick up some fresh lettuce at the grocery store grown just down the road.

Thanks for watching Dakota Life.

If you've missed any of our stories here in Newell, or just want to go back and take another look, you can see more at SDPB.ORG/DAKOTALIFE from all of us at SDPB here in Butte County.

Thanks for watching.