Rockerville, South Dakota: The Gold Camp That Ran on Borrowed Water

01A Name Taken from the Gold Pan's Cousin

The town takes its name from the "rockers" miners used to separate placer gold from gravel. A rocker was a wooden cradle that was rocked by hand while water washed lighter material away and left the heavier gold behind. Rockerville sits at about 4,370 feet, and its gold lay loose in the creek gravels rather than locked in hard rock.

Accounts disagree on when the discovery happened. Andreas' Historical Atlas of Dakota (1884) says the town owed its existence mainly to William Keeler's discovery of gold in its placers in December 1876. True West magazine gives the same date and repeats an anecdote in which Keeler kept moving rocks that interfered with his sleep, only to find they were nuggets. That story rests on a single source. A Black Hills newspaper of 2 June 1882 puts the first discovery in February 1877, with Keeler's camp then on Battle Creek. The newspaper clipping is partly garbled in its digitized form. Western Mining History says only that the initial discoveries were in 1877.

The sources do not settle the question. What they agree on is that Keeler found the gold and that a camp formed around it by 1877. A hand-drawn claims map from about 1878, described by a rare-book dealer, shows a small street grid, a road from Rapid City, a well, and a sawmill. The dealer also reports that the placers supposedly yielded $250,000 in 1878.

02How a Flume Made Rockerville a Mining Town

The gold was rich, but there was little water to work it with. Placer mining needs a steady flow to wash gravel, and the diggings near Rockerville were dry. The solution was to bring a creek to the claims.

According to the U.S. Forest Service, the Rockerville Flume carried water 20 miles from Spring Creek, west of Sheridan Lake, to the diggings. It operated until 1885 and, in the Forest Service's words, "enabled miners to take over $20 million in gold." Other sources give different figures for the flume. True West says it was 17 miles long and finished by 1880, and a local history site says a 17-mile flume was built in 1878. Andreas records that the Black Hills' Placer Mining Company completed "the great flume" in August 1880, supplying 2,000 miners' inches of water. A miner's inch is a unit for measuring the flow of water.

In 1881 the Rockerville Gold Mining Company was organized to build a bedrock flume about 1,100 feet long. Andreas says it "scarcely realized expectations." John C. H. Grabill photographed miners panning from the flume near the Rockerville mining district in the 1880s and 1890s. The Library of Congress holds his images.

The South Dakota Office of Tourism says Rockerville was booming by 1880, with hundreds of buildings and about 1,000 residents. The Center for Land Use Interpretation counts about 100 buildings, and Andreas, writing close to the time, calls the town "a busy and thriving town of several hundred inhabitants." The post office opened in 1879.

03What Happened to Rockerville?

The decline came fast. Andreas reports that by the fall of 1883 only about fifteen families still lived in Rockerville. The placers had played out, and miners left for other opportunities. The flume stopped carrying water in 1885. The post office stayed open until 1915, which suggests a small community held on for decades after the rush ended. By 1930, according to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the town was in ruins.

Rockerville's second life began in the mid-20th century. Tourism kept it going for decades, and by the 1950s and 1960s it was a roadside tourist town on US 16. Attractions included a "Mellerdrammer" theatre, a ghost-town set, and an "It's a Small World" museum. The original wood-frame building that later became the Gaslight saloon dates to 1958, according to Pennington County property records.

The attraction did not last. The Rapid City Journal reports that the McCullens operated "Rockerville" as an attraction until 1966, then sold it ahead of a highway change in the mid-1960s that left the town between the lanes of a four-lane road. By the early 1990s the town was essentially abandoned. The Center for Land Use Interpretation, writing in 2004, says it was "abandoned again" after its last owners gave up several years earlier, and it notes that the town was listed for sale.

04Can You Visit Rockerville Today?

Yes, though what you can see is limited. Rockerville is an unincorporated community, and one listing gives its 2010 population as 148. You can reach it by car along US 16 between Rapid City and Hill City, and the road passes through the remnant tourist "ghost town." Abandoned Rockerville is not a fenced-off ruin, and some of its buildings have been rebuilt. Some of the structures beside the highway are the leftovers of the tourist era, not the mining camp of the 1870s and 1880s.

The best-known survivor is the Gaslight Dining Saloon, one of the last businesses in town. The original building burned in September 2013. It was rebuilt within a year and is still operating. General manager Melissa Clemetson told KOTA that her parents bought the land back and rebuilt the saloon, and that a community still lives there. Local lore holds that the Gaslight's bar came from the Harney Hotel in Rapid City and that a ghost called "Mr. Harney" haunts it. That is a family story, not a documented fact.

05What Remains of Rockerville Today

The most substantial piece of the original Rockerville is the flume. The Rockerville Flume Trail (Forest Service Trail #50) follows the actual flume bed through the Black Hills, with tunnels and flume remnants along the way. The trail ends near Rockerville at the Coon Hollow Trailhead. Hikers who walk it are following the water route that made the town's gold practical to mine.

The state's historical marker index lists two markers tied to the town, #67 "Rockerville" and #392 "Rockerville Flume Dam Site." Rockerville's later tourist history is easier to see than the mining camp. Besides the Gaslight, there is the highway itself, which runs through the middle of what is left of the town.