The town of Wall was founded at the end of the Chicago and North Western Railroad Line, taking its name from the broken buttes and coulees of the surrounding South Dakota badlands 50 miles east of Rapid City . The town improbably became famous when Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the local drugstore during the Great Depression and began advertising free water on road signs for hundreds of miles. Wall Drug is still an institution and still gives away cups of water.
Planning a visit? Stay at Sleepy Hollow Campground.
Wall is perched on the border of Buffalo Gap National Grasslands, which includes the Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, America’s only national park site devoted to the Cold War. Wall is also the gateway to to the western entrance of Badlands National Park, where bison, prairie dogs, bighorn sheep and America’s most endangered mammal, the black-footed ferret, live. On the road to the Badlands the Prairie Homestead preserves one of the last remaining sod houses on the Great Plains, built in 1909.
Buffalo Gap National Grassland
The first lots in town were sold on July 10, 1907 and a birthday blow-out has taken place on the streets of Wall every year since. Now a three-day party, the Wall Celebration features a rodeo, parade, dance and plenty of stick-to-the-ribs food.