Palisades State Park began with an initial gift of 20 acres from Mrs. Winona Axtell Lyon in 1947, expanded through additional small tracts over the next twenty years, and in 1969 gained 50 more acres for a total of 110 acres before the South Dakota legislature officially designated it a state park on July 1, 1972. It is the smallest state park in South Dakota and preserves the ancient rock formations along Split Rock Creek. Across the gorge once stood the village first called Pleasant Valley, which grew around C.W. Patten's mill after it was completed in the early 1870s as the first flour mill in the region, drawing settlers who hauled grain by ox-drawn wagons. Renamed Palisades in 1882 for the pink cliffs along the town, it had a mill, hotel, grocery store, livery stable, drugstore, newspaper, and two other stores by 1888, but after the Sioux City and Northern Railroad bypassed it the following year and joined a point north at present-day Garretson, residents moved their homes and businesses there. Patten, who arrived in 1865 as one of the area's first homesteaders, built one of the region's first feed and flour mills using overland lumber from Elk Point and salvaged lumber from old Fort Dakota, with water power supplied by a dam across Split Rock Creek, a stone mill race, an overshot wheel, and a cable belt running through a tunnel to the mill house. Although high water, ice, boulders, and vegetation have erased most traces of the dam and race, iron stakes in solid rock and the old stone tunnel remain visible.