Leading A Life ... In Lead, South Dakota - Part 2

As I mentioned in the last column, I was able to return to my old home in Lead, South Dakota.  Lead hasn't been a thriving community since at least 2001, when they started the process of shutting down the Homestake Gold Mine, but what I was on this visit stunned me.

Here is a town that, in the 1930s, was one of the few areas in the country that didn't suffer through the Great Depression.  Because Homestake supplied most of the gold used by the government to back its currency, there were more jobs than people and everyone in Lead had plenty.  Homes were well taken care of.  Roads were better than those in most metropolitan areas.  The community's pride was evident.

Today, the town has definitely fallen on desperate times.  The impact of the Homestake closure is clear.  When we lived there, my late husband was a house painter and most of the homes he had painted in town had not been touched since he did the paint job, which was over 10 years ago.  Many of the homes stand vacant; the owners who had paid their homes off before the mine closed simply locked the door and walked away when they couldn't sell after the shutdown.  Those who owed money on their homes were foreclosed upon.  Regardless the reason, the number of vacant homes in Lead is startling.

The biggest blight on the landscape was seeing what happened to Homestake over the last ten years since I last was in Lead.  In years past, the mountainside next to the road leading from Lead into Deadwood was stacked with the buildings that made up the refinery; they were fixtures in town.  Now, the refinery has been torn down and the promised park has never come to fruition.  So the mountainside stands bare, save for some of the concrete still remaining from the refinery.  Very sad.

It's not that the town is completely falling in on itself, although that happened in the 1980s, when the center of town caved into the mine, leaving a huge gaping hole right where Main Street used to be.  The area is now called the Open Cut; the town is building a visitor's center to try and attract someone to come visit the town.  There are actually really well-maintained homes for sale at extremely reasonable prices.  When you consider the average listing price of a home in Austin, Texas is $340,000, finding a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house in Lead for $105,000 is a steal.

So why don't people want to move there?  It's simple - the weather and work.  If you're a Yankee, used to snow in the winter, unless you're from the mountains in Colorado or Vermont, you really can't appreciate the amount of snow the area gets.  The first weekend of October 2013 saw over three feet of snow and that snow stuck around and was built upon over the next six months.

Living in the mountains in winter is touchy at best.  Four-wheel-drive vehicles are a necessity, especially if you live at the top of one of the hills in town.  If you stayed home every time it snowed, you wouldn't leave your home from October until the end of April, so you learn to deal with it.  My husband, a Texan, learned the hard way, needing to be towed out of several sticky situations he slid into the first six months we lived there.

Work is the other big challenge.  Most people who have made a success of living in Lead work for themselves, most in the construction field, although there are those, like me, who work on the internet, so it doesn't matter where you live.  With construction, though, the weather plays a significant factor again - you need to work like crazy from May until October so you can have enough money to survive from October to May.  The family we stayed with on our visit sustains themselves on the money the husband earns as a roofer for six months of the year, working a zillion hours until it's impossible to climb on another roof for fear of sliding off.

Yet, the place, for all its foibles, is beautiful.  I've never lived anywhere as beautiful, regardless the season.  And quiet.  In most areas of the country, there is the constant noise of traffic.  In Lead, it's just quiet.  It's the rare place you can go to just be still, something most of us never get to experience.  It leads to a calmness and tranquility hard to find these days.

If you get a chance to visit Lead and Deadwood, I would heartily recommend it.  I'm so happy I got a chance to go back, to visit the home I shared with my lovely husband and daughter.  While I could never go back there permanently, it remains one of the best experiences of my life and I'm so grateful for the opportunity to spend five years in, what we lovingly called, Mayberry.