Home›Places›Lead, SD›Hearst Free Library
Historic place

Hearst Free Library

315 West Main St, Lead, SD

Phoebe Apperson Hearst gave the miners of Lead a free public library stocked with 10,000 books in dozens of languages — a gift she personally curated.

📅 1894–present🏛️ LibraryStill hereBuilt 1894
Open on the mapSlide back to 1894

The story

The Hearst Free Library was presented to the City of Lead on December 25, 1894, a gift from Phoebe Apperson Hearst, widow of Homestake co-founder George Hearst. Its dedication drew over 1,000 residents — too many for the library itself, so it was held in the Miners Union Opera House. Because Lead's workforce was drawn from dozens of immigrant communities, Phoebe Hearst personally selected hundreds of foreign-language volumes for the opening collection of more than 10,000 books. It still serves roughly 30,000 visits a year.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

The 1894 collection included thousands of foreign-language volumes for Lead's immigrant miners.
The dedication drew over 1,000 people — held at the opera house because the library couldn't hold them.
It still serves about 30,000 visits a year, more than 130 years later.

Connected places

The Latchstring Inn

Savoy, SD
Homestake

Homestake Hydroelectric Plant No. 2

Savoy, SD
Homestake

Nemo (Homestake timber camp)

Nemo, SD
Homestake

Homestake Hydroelectric Plant No. 1

Spearfish, SD
Lead

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Black Hills Mining Museum

323 West Main St · 15 m away
Built by more than 100 retired Homestake miners themselves, this museum lets visitors walk through a recreated undergrou

Historic Homestake Opera House

313 West Main St · 41 m away
A $250,000 gift from the Homestake Mining Company gave Gilded Age gold miners their own opera house, heated swimming poo

Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)

160 West Main St · 263 m away
The world's most productive gold mine became the deepest underground physics lab in the U.S., where scientists hunt for

Central City

Central City (US-385, Deadwood Gulch) · 1.9 km away
Once a booming gulch town of 3,000 that nearly rivaled Deadwood and Lead, Central City absorbed half a dozen neighboring

Broken Boot Gold Mine

1200 Pioneer Way · 2.9 km away
Opened the same year as the gold rush itself, it barely made money on gold — its real product was fool's gold, sold for

Homestake Slime Plant (Deadwood Mountain Grand)

1906 Deadwood Mountain Drive · 3.8 km away
A gold-processing plant built with Douglas fir beams railed in from Washington State ran until 1973, then sat as a count

Know something about Hearst Free Library? An old photo, a date, a memory of what stood here before?

Add it on the map
Sourceshttps://cityoflead.com/city-departments/hearst-library