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Historic place

Custer City

Downtown Custer (US-16/US-385), Custer, SD

Originally christened "Stonewall" by trespassing gold-boomers, this French Creek camp became the very first white settlement in the Black Hills — then was nearly deserted within a year when a bigger strike lured everyone to Deadwood.

📅 1875–present🏛️ Historic TownStill hereBuilt 1875
Open on the mapSlide back to 1875
Custer City, Downtown Custer (US-16/US-385), Custer, SD
Custer, South Dakota · Jared Winkler, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

The story

Custer was founded in 1875 by prospectors who pushed into the Black Hills ahead of any legal opening — the region was still reserved for the Lakota under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, but word of gold from Custer's 1874 expedition was impossible to contain. Settlers first named the camp "Stonewall" after Confederate general Stonewall Jackson before renaming it Custer. It's generally considered the oldest Euro-American town in the Black Hills. The boom was brief: richer strikes at Deadwood Gulch in 1876 nearly emptied it. It survived to become the seat of Custer County.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

Custer's original name was "Stonewall," after Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.
It was founded by prospectors trespassing on land reserved for the Lakota by the 1868 treaty.
It was nearly emptied within a year when word of richer Deadwood strikes spread in 1876.

Connected places

Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF)

Lead, SD
Black Hills

Spearfish Canyon Scenic Byway

Spearfish, SD
Black Hills

Roughlock Falls

Savoy, SD
Black Hills

Galena (silver camp)

Deadwood, SD
Black Hills

Nemo (Homestake timber camp)

Nemo, SD
Black Hills

Nuttal & Mann's Saloon No. 10

Deadwood, SD
Deadwood

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

1874 French Creek Gold Discovery Site

French Creek near Custer · 221 m away
On French Creek near this spot, prospectors riding with Custer's 1874 expedition panned the first flecks of gold that to

Flintstones Bedrock City

US-16/US-385 jct (Bedrock City) · 1.3 km away
For nearly 50 years, kids could ride a miniature train past a papier-mache volcano named "Mt. St. Wilma" and pose beside

Gordon Stockade

US-16A, Custer State Park (near Stockade Lake) · 5.5 km away
Twenty-eight illegal prospectors — including the first white woman known to enter the Black Hills — built this log fort

Crazy Horse Memorial

12151 Avenue of the Chiefs · 8.0 km away
Lakota Chief Henry Standing Bear told sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, "My fellow chiefs and I would like the white man to k

Sylvan Lake

Sylvan Lake, Custer State Park · 9.2 km away
This granite-ringed "jewel of the Black Hills" predates Custer State Park by three decades — and in 2007 it stood in for

Needles Highway

SD Highway 87 (Needles Highway) · 9.4 km away
Governor Peter Norbeck personally walked and rode horseback over every foot of the route before a single machine touched

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Sourceshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer,_South_Dakota