SCOUTING YESTERDAY | Plans hatched for South Dakota's first statewide highway

This week in South Dakota history: April 4-10

Custer Battlefield Highway

A century ago, the state Highway Commission unveiled plans for South Dakota’s first year-round, graded and graveled road connecting Sioux Falls to Rapid City, according to an April 1924 edition of The Deadwood Telegram.

It was only five decades earlier that the first public roadways in what is now South Dakota were established by the 1870 territorial legislature. Setting aside 66-foot-wide strips between sections of land, mile-long section line dirt roads would create a grid-work across the state.