Windbreak House

Like most Western communities, Hermosa, South Dakota, is home to a growing population with varied goals, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Like many such communities, it could easily become only a collection of bedrooms, a place to build a house and let the dog run loose while a family goes to work or school in the larger town nearby, Rapid City. The members of HAHA would like to use their organization and this building to create, or re-create, a community spirit that matches the challenge of the changes we face. We’d like Hermosa to be more than a collection of separate houses with Black Hills views and big security lights.

Churches often provide community cohesion, and Hermosa has three, besides a branch library, a locally-owned and operated café, a grocery store, a convenience store, the usual tavern, and various social clubs that create a web of connections. Businesses focus on the larger rural community, and the volunteer fire department draws members from every social level.

But there’s no single place where members of all these groups can get together, can cooperate in building the kind of community where we all want to live. The Hermosa Arts and History Association would like to change that by preserving past history as well as helping the town and the surrounding community move into the future with the cooperation of all residents, old and new.

Since 1889, the building housing the Hermosa Arts and History Association has stood four-square at the center of community life. In the beginning, it sheltered our first school, then a Masonic Lodge. Symbolically, the structure embodies a history most towns have lost to bulldozers and change. The Association’s governing board has vigorous plans and energetic members ready to fill the structure with activities that will appeal to residents and their families, to students, and to visitors. In order to face its second century, however, the building needs critical maintenance and repair work.