2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 7; Rockerville, SD, the ghost town surrounded by US Route 16

After leaving Mount Rushmore I headed east on South Dakota State Route 244 to US 16A near Keystone. I traveled eastbound on US 16A to US 16 which headed towards I-90 near Rapid City. Along the way I stopped in Rockerville a small ghost town in Pennington County located uniquely between the travel lanes of the US 16 expressway.

This blog post is the 7th in the 2016 Summer Mountain Trip series, Part 6 can be found here:

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 6; Mount Rushmore

Rockerville was founded during 1876 at the height of the Black Hills Gold Rush and reached a peak population of about 1,000 by 1880. Rockerville would see a decline after mining had dwindled in the Black Hills until US 16 became a tourist destination to drive traffic to the Mount Rushmore Area. US 16 originally traversed Rockerville along Main Street until the modern expressway bisected the community in the 1970s. Oddly the US 16 expressway wasn't routed along a single side of Rockerville but rather split the community in half leaving Main Street largely intact.

Rockerville had been surviving off tourist traffic until the US 16 expressway was built. All the road side attractions largely shuttered after US 16 was moved off of Main Street leaving a husk of former tourist traps scattered on the side of the road.

Part 8 of the 2016 Summer Mountain Trip series can be found here:

2016 Summer Mountain Trip Part 8; Badlands National Park and former US 16A on SD 240

Comments

Did Caltrans just kill the G26 cutout US Route shields?

The US Route System was formally created by the American Association of State Highway Officials during November 1926. Through the history of the system the only state to which has elected to maintain cutout US Route shields has been California. The G26 series cutout US Route shields have become a favorite in the road enthusiast hobby and are generally considered to be much more visually pleasing than the standard Federal Highway Administration variant. However, the G26 shield series appears to have been killed off on January 18, 2026, when Caltrans updated their Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices. This blog will examine the history of the US Route shield specifications in California and what is happening with the 2026 changes. The blog cover photo is facing towards the terminus of California State Route 136 and at a G26-2 specification US Route 395 shield. In the background Mount Whitney can be seen in the Sierra Nevada range. ...

May 2023 Ontario Trip (Part 3 of 3)

Over the years, I have made plenty of trips to Ontario, crisscrossing the southern, central and eastern parts of the province. Living in Upstate New York, it's pretty easy to visit our neighbor to the north, or is that our neighbor to the west? Ottawa is one of my favorite cities to visit anywhere in the world, plus I've discovered the charm of Kingston, the waterfalls of Hamilton (which is on the same Niagara Escarpment that brings us Niagara Falls), the sheer beauty of the Bruce Peninsula, and more. But I hadn't explored much of Cottage Country. So I decided to change that, and what better time to go than over Memorial Day weekend, when the daylight is long and I have an extra day to explore. On the third and final day of my trip, I started in Huntsville and made my way through Muskoka District and Haliburton County, passing by many lakes along the way. I stopped in towns such as Dorset, Haliburton and Bancroft before making a beeline down to Belleville and then over th...

Ghost Town Tuesday; Nichols, FL

A couple years ago I spent a lot of spare time exploring phosphate mining ghost towns in the Bone Valley of Polk County, Florida. One ghost town in particular called Nichols on Polk County Route 676 west of Mulberry caught my eye due to a relative lack of documentation on ghosttowns.com. Nichols was created in 1905 during the early phosphate mining boom in the Bone Valley region. For the time Nichols was unusual since it had company housing in the Nichols Mine site and private residences outside the gate. Nichols is only about two miles west of Mulberry which probably made it a somewhat reasonable commute even by the wonky standards of the early 20th Century. Most of the Bone Valley region was relatively remote which made commuting or homesteading impractical which is why there are so many ghost towns in the area. The company housing section of Nichols was phased out and abandoned by 1950. The Nichols town site is largely abandoned and could "possibl...

Gribblenation

Search This Blog