How We Preserve South Dakota History

The South Dakota Hall of Fame’s mission is to Champion a Culture of Excellence and to inspire future generations of Dream Chasers. We do this by sharing the inspiring stories of Inductees in a variety of different ways.

Whenever an individual is inducted into the South Dakota Hall of Fame, their induction includes collecting a variety of materials to help share their stories. This unique archive goes back over 45 years and is one of the most comprehensive and unique collections about South Dakotans and their statewide influence.

This collection not only preserves history, but it helps inspire others as a visual representation of the way these Inductees chased their dreams and helped change South Dakota through their legacy. It contains photos, slides, cassette tape archives, documents, physical artifacts, and most importantly, Inductees’ life stories.

As a primary source of storytelling for the over 700 people now enshrined in the South Dakota Hall of Fame, we work tirelessly to preserve this collection. However, this priceless collection is at risk; The tapes, documents, photos, slides, and videos that now comprise the archive will degrade with time.

This is why we are working to digitize the full collection of Legacies of every single inductee. It is estimated that about 50 percent of the collection is currently digitized. By digitizing our full collection, not only will we preserve history safely, but we will be able to share these stories far and wide with a worldwide audience on the internet.

We are honored to preserve these stories and thrilled to share them with more people as the online digitilized collection grows. One such example of our work to preserve history is the video below. This video is an episode of South Dakota Personalities, featuring Inductee Dr. Paul Holm, and filmed in 1987.

2019 Inductee Bill Groethe, during his time as an Army Air Corp Photographer

2000 Inductee Earl Brockelsby, founder of Reptile Gardens in Rapid City, SD