Wall Drug draws as many as 20,000 visitors on hot summer days making it difficult to imagine the sprawling 76,000-square-foot tourist shopping and amusement mall was once a tiny pharmacy in sleepy small-town Wall, South Dakota.
Wall Drug is eight miles from Badlands National Park, 60 miles from Mount Rushmore, and 70 Miles from the Black Hills. Locals in the early 1930s liked to say that the town of Wall was "in the middle of nowhere", but that all changed after Ted and Dorothy Hustead bought the town drugstore after searching for a small town with a Catholic Church where pharmacist Ted could have his own store and the couple could raise their family.
The town of Wall had less than 400 people in 1931, when the Husteads bought the drug store. Mount Rushmore was about a decade from completion, drought plagued the prairies, and the Great Depression was heading into some of its toughest years.
Business was tough in the early years for the Husteads. Many of the townspeople of Wall were poor farmers, and traffic on the nearby highway just zipped past Wall without stopping.
In 1936, Dorothy Hustead came up with a brilliant idea. She suggested that her husband put up signs along the highway advertising free ice water to travelers.
Ted thought the idea sounded a little crazy, especially as many drug stores at the time gave customers free water, but he was willing to try anything to draw business into Wall Drug.
Ted took some hand-painted signs out to the highway, put them up, and by the time he got back to the store there was already a line of people who stopped by for free water. The Husteads poured a lot of free water that day, but also sold a lot of ice cream cones and snacks to their new customers.
This success encouraged Ted to put up a lot more signs, many of them with corny sayings. Soon, there were Wall Drug signs in most states, with over 3,000 highway signs in place by the 1960s.
The Husteads began to think of more ways to draw customers into their ever-expanding business. Their son Bill joined the business in 1951 and worked to establish Wall Drug as a real family tourist attraction.
Today, a quirky collection of attractions in the store's Back Yard includes a miniature Mount Rushmore, a life-sized animated T-Rex that roars every 15 minutes, and a jackalope. There are many other mechanical attractions and "picture taking props" scattered throughout the mall with 28 retail departments that include a book store, a Black Hills jewelry store, boot store, pharmacy museum, restaurant, and to prove that Michigan's Mackinac Island doesn't corner the market on "fudgies", there's even a fudge store!
(Tim always says I put so many crazy photos of him on this blog and wonders why I don't include any silly photos of me here. So, just for him, and just this once, here's a photo of me on the famous Wall Drug jackalope!)
Even as Wall Drug changed over the years, some things remain the same. You can still get a free glass of ice water at the well in the Wall Drug Back yard, buy a cup of coffee for 5 cents, or pick up a prescription at Wall Drug's small pharmacy.
Hundreds of signs advertising Wall Drug string along Interstate 90 through South Dakota and into some neighboring states, many of them with the same sayings that adorned some of the signs Ted put up decades earlier.
Even as Wall Drug draws over one million visitors each year, it remains a family owned and operated business under the guidance of a third generation of Husteads.
Ted and Dorothy's grandson, Ted, is president of the company today and narrated the Discoveries...America, Wall Drug DVD available at Amazon.
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
