Theodore Reder dammed the creek at Sunday Gulch in 1881 and made Sylvan Lake, seventeen acres of water at six thousand one hundred and forty five feet, with a hotel built on the shore beside it. Some accounts give the year as 1891 and the question has never been settled. The state bought the property, the lake became part of Custer State Park when the park was established on 1 July 1919, and the hotel burned on the night of 30 June 1935. What went up in its place did not go back on the shore. The park board approached Frank Lloyd Wright, and although the building was designed by Harold Spitznagel of Sioux Falls, the resort's own account credits Wright with choosing the new site, on a hillside above the water among pine and spruce rather than on the lake edge. That much is the operator's claim rather than a documented one. The rest is on the record: the Public Works Administration's 1939 survey lists the lodge as completed in September 1937 at a construction cost of 140,008 dollars, of which 57,240 was federal, with the Civilian Conservation Corps hauling stone, laying water and sewer lines and putting up seventeen log cabins alongside. Twenty nine guest rooms, native stone walls, and a lounge two storeys high floored in random width oak.
Getting there
43.8450, -103.5671
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
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