Keystone: The Town That Built the Mountain

Keystone started as a hard-rock mining camp in the Black Hills, with the first gold claim staked in the early eighteen eighties and the town formally established in eighteen eighty-three. Miners pulled gold, mica, feldspar, and tin from the surrounding ridges for decades, and the town survived the boom-and-bust cycles that emptied so many neighboring camps.

Then in nineteen twenty-seven everything changed. Sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who had chosen the granite face of nearby Mount Rushmore two years earlier, began carving his monument to four American presidents, and Keystone became the workers' town for one of the most ambitious carvings in history. Most of the nearly four hundred men who drilled and dynamited the mountain over the next fourteen years lived right here. Among them was Harold Swanzey, stepson of Carrie Ingalls, the youngest Ingalls sister of Little House on the Prairie fame. Carrie had moved to Keystone in nineteen eleven, edited a local newspaper, and married David Swanzey the following year. She lived here until her death in nineteen forty-six, just five years after the mountain was declared complete.