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Historic place

Silver City

Head of Pactola Lake (US-385), Silver City, SD

Founded in the 1876 silver rush and originally called "Elkhorn Prairie" by Custer's own expedition, Silver City dodged the fate of its drowned Black Hills neighbors — it sits just upstream of the very dam that flooded a different ghost town entirely.

📅 1876–present🏛️ Mining CampStill hereBuilt 1876
Open on the mapSlide back to 1876
Silver City, Head of Pactola Lake (US-385), Silver City, SD
Silver City, South Dakota · George Alexander Grant, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The story

Silver City was settled in 1876 during a wave of silver prospecting; Custer's 1874 expedition had already named the spot "Elkhorn Prairie." The camp grew at the head of what is now Pactola Lake on Rapid Creek and was once served by the "Crouch Line" railroad. It's frequently confused with a different, actually-submerged town called "Pactola" — but Silver City sits at the upstream western end of the reservoir and was never drowned. It survives today as a small unincorporated community of roughly 80 homes with a church, volunteer fire department, and community center in the old schoolhouse.

Everything that was here

Did you know?

Custer's 1874 expedition had already named this spot "Elkhorn Prairie" before the silver rush.
It's often confused with the actually-submerged "Pactola" townsite — but Silver City sits upstream and was never flooded.
It has never been tracked as an official Census-designated place, despite ~80 homes today.

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

Explore the full web of connections on the map.

Nearby history

Mystic (ghost town)

Castle Creek, Rapid Canyon (Mickelson Trail #7) · 6.3 km away
First named "Sitting Bull," this Rapid Canyon mining camp got its own private railroad — the "Crouch Line" — and a $1 mi

Nemo (Homestake timber camp)

Nemo Rd / Vanocker Canyon Rd · 13.1 km away
A tiny Black Hills valley town founded to feed the Homestake Gold Mine's timber appetite became the site of the first re

Rochford (mining town)

Rochford (off FS Rd 17) · 13.2 km away
Discovered by accident when three Deadwood hunters stumbled on gold-bearing rock in 1876, Rochford grew to around 1,000

Sheridan (drowned townsite)

Sheridan Lake (US-385) · 14.6 km away
South Dakota's very first Pennington County seat spent its last decades as a dying gold camp of about 10 people — then v

The 1880 Train (Black Hills Central Railroad)

222 Railroad Ave · 17.0 km away
The oldest continuously operating standard-gauge steam railroad in America runs on tracks originally laid during the 189

Chapel in the Hills

3788 Chapel Lane · 21.5 km away
An exact hand-carved replica of Norway's 850-year-old Borgund stave church, built in the Black Hills in 1969 as the on-s

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