Dakota Wesleyan: College Built While Living in Sod

Dakota Wesleyan University in Mitchell, South Dakota was founded in eighteen eighty-five, when the Dakota Territory was barely settled and most of its inhabitants were still living in sod-walled homes. A small group of Methodist settlers had secured a charter two years earlier, driven, in their own words, by the conviction that they must build a college of stone while living in houses of sod. They chose Mitchell over other territorial sites specifically to keep students away from urban distractions.

The institution was called Dakota University until nineteen oh four, when it adopted its current name. Today it is a private United Methodist university with roughly eight hundred students, and its campus is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It remains one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the Dakotas, outlasting the frontier conditions that gave it its founding impulse.