Memorial Creek Walls

Memorial Creek Walls. These stone creek walls are just a small part of the longest improvement Project built in Madison during the Great Depression. The Memorial Creek Walls stretch three-quarters of a mile along the creek between Northwest Fifth Street and East Center Street. The same walls line the creek banks in Memorial Park., The Great Depression was a time of economic desperation in the United States. The entire country suffered from 1929 through 1939, but South Dakota felt the effects much earlier. Property values and farm production fell in the 1920s, and tens of thousands of farmers lost their land. When South Dakota suffered terrible drought in the 1930s, recovery became even harder, causing high unemployment and need. Because of the national crisis, the United States government made programs to give emergency aid to the states. Local governments planned civic improvements and used grants and loans of relief money to hire out-of-work laborers to build them. One of the agencies that provided these funds was the Works Progress Administration (WPA)., In 1936, the city of Madison chose creek improvements for one of its relief projects. It applied to the WPA in July 1937 to "straighten the creek bed" and "line the creek banks with masonry walls and riprap" to protect Madison from spring and flash floods. Two more applications in June and October of 1938 asked for additional money to finish the work. In all, the WPA contributed $71,076 for the $90,565 project. or 78 percent of the cost. The City of Madison paid the rest, buying supplies and renting equipment for the project. Almost 90 percent of the WPA's funds went to labor and put jobless Lake County citizens to work., Beginning in 1937, between 50 and 70 unskilled laborers worked on the creek at a time until they finished the job in 1939. Digging the channel to make it wider and deeper began on October 1, and wall construction started on October 26, 1937. The city obtained the stone for the walls for free. Lake County farmers donated most of the granite boulders and were happy to have them removed from their land. At the roadbed of an abandoned line of the Dakota Central Railroad, relief workers gathered the quartzite. This had probably been quarried in Sioux Falls and Dell Rapids decades earlier. Supervised by master stone masons, the workers split the granite boulders to create a flat surface. Flat stones became the surface of the wall. Workers laid round and irregular ones in the base of the wall. Small quartzite stones filled in the gaps. The finished walls became a mark of community pride in Madison and are vital to the city's visual character.