Posters: Library of Congress/ Lester Beall
A farmer stores eggs and milk in an icebox.
4
Learn. Dream. Grow.
Photo: Ag Heritage Museum
by Katy Beem
Katy Beem: What was the impetus for this particular doc? Brian Gevik: “After seeing the success of Stephanie Rissler’s Vanished South Dakota documentary for SDPB, I and a couple of other people at SDPB thought a lot about what might have made the “Vanished” project so popular. One of the things we learned is that South Dakotans and especially rural South Dakotans are generally proud of where they come from. Heritage and history can be very personal for people when something can be said about where they come from or who their people were. We started thinking about how rural South Dakota developed — why some towns thrived and some towns up-and-died. In historical terms, the obvious answer is that towns connected to the world by a railroad survived and towns without a rail connection died. But there’s more to it than that. A lot of things factor into how rural people and places thrive, from institutions like schools and churches to basic infrastructure like good farmto-market roads. We tend to take a lot of these things for granted today. Again, looking at history, think about when there was no electricity outside of towns and cities. The rural electrification work of the 1930s through the 1960s changed virtually everything about rural life. It’s right up there with the combustion engine. There’s the very literal reality of wires connecting remote farms and ranches to a reliable power provider and there’s also the fact that rural people connected with one another to make electrification happen. They formed co-ops and they figured it out. People without some connection to the basic amenities of the world and to their neighbors are living in the middle of nowhere, whether it’s South Dakota or anywhere else. People who have those connections can say they’re really
