Some travelers find intrigue in getting off the main drag and searching for the unique travel sight. I should know. I’m one of those people.
Lemmon, South Dakota sits directly on the border of North Dakota. Drive north on Main Avenue and suddenly you’re in North Lemmon, which is in North Dakota. It is neither populous (about 1,400 residents) nor terribly close to anything else (it’s about 90 miles northeast to Bismarck or northwest to Dickinson, both on Interstate 94).
But back in the 1930s, on the heels of the great stock market crash – keeping in mind that finding local people work was a noble undertaking – Lemmon also became host to a curiosity that remains to this day, filling a city block facing Main Street at 6th.
Ole S. Quammen, an amateur geologist, put some 40 to 50 men to work gathering samples of petrified wood for miles around. From 1930 to 1932, those samples and other artifacts, including dinosaur bones and other fossilized animals, came together in a park setting that defies simple description. In 1954, Quammen’s descendants gave the park to the city.
The property today includes two major buildings built in petrified wood and stone. One houses the park’s gift shop and mini-museum, and the second has a much more extensive set of displays covering local history. To say that the exhibits here are “eclectic” might be understating the case.
But it is the exotic design and form of the “world’s largest petrified wood park” adjacent to these two buildings that more immediately draw the eye.
Despite a couple of flat-topped columns near one entrance, the primary architectural form of the park starts wide and circular at the bottom and ends with a point at the top. One after another, the cones eventually encourage a look towards the sky, which may, or may not, have been their original intention.
That’s partly because some of the forms and shapes at ground level compete for one’s attention. Beyond petrified wood, some manmade items are built of rounded “cannonball” stones dredged from the nearby river of the same name.
While perhaps the outdoor multi-level waterfall and the wall built with stones that show prehistoric dinosaur claw marks rank near the top of “most intriguing” sights in this place where idiosyncratic is the norm, I would have to rank the “cave” and the “castle” as the winners. You can go inside them, and when you do, you can view the petrified dinosaur and wooly mammoth bones that are integral to the interior walls.
Clearly, the charms of the Petrified Wood Park in Lemmon won’t attract everyone, and the park isn’t terribly convenient. But believe me, the pictures alone will be worth it!
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Getting there: Lemmon, South Dakota is located in northwest South Dakota at the North Dakota border, along U.S. Highway 12. The Petrified Wood Park is at the corner of Main Avenue and 6th Street, five blocks north of route 12. The nearest commercial airport is Bismarck, N.D.
