Downtown History

Oscar Kemp filed paperwork for a homestead near today’s 19th Street East in 1879, and after he had plowed two furrows across the land, a workman scrawled “Kemp Avenue” on a board from an old crate and set it beside the road, marking the start of a community. Between April and June 1879, early settlers rapidly turned a treeless prairie into a town with two bakeries, five lumberyards, three hardware stores, four blacksmiths, four hotels, two barbers, five drugstores, two billiard halls, 14 general stores, one wagon and carriage shop, two newspapers, and one livery stable. In the decades that followed, many early wooden structures were replaced by sturdier brick buildings, and more than 100 buildings still stand in the historic commercial district, many with histories going back over a century. After Watertown was settled in 1879, city government lacked a permanent home for at least a decade, but in 1885 a mayor and council government chose the corner of West Kemp Avenue and 1st Street SW for a city hall, and in the spring of 1889 construction began on a three-story brick building that housed city offices, the police station, the fire department, and Watertown’s first library for the next 75 years. The Grand Opera House, also known as the Opera House block and the Stokes block, rose on the northeast corner of Maple Street and Kemp Avenue, with its cornerstone laid in May 1887 and the building opened in November 1887. The Century Block on the southwest corner of Maple Street and Kemp Avenue was built in 1900-1901 on land owned by H. R. Pease and D. L. Kirwin, with retail space on the first floor, offices on the second, and a Knights of Pythias temple on the third; its original design included a round tower, and it has since been restored to house a law office and artist’s gallery. The Carnegie Library opened in 1906 as Watertown’s second library with a Carnegie Foundation grant, under an agreement that it would always be free to everyone in the community; it served as the library until 1967, then became home to the Codington County Historical Society in 1975 and continues as a community museum. In 1908, plumbers Samuel Hess and Albert Rau began erecting a large building on North Maple Street for Schaller’s Department Store, but when that plan fell through they continued construction themselves, completing the Metropolitan Theatre in 1911 and a four-story hotel in the summer of 1912 at a cost of $120,000, billed as completely fireproof. Charles Goss, an English-born businessman who later lived in Sparta, Wisconsin, had built a two-story wooden store building by 1880 on the southeast corner of Kemp Avenue and Maple Street to sell groceries and drugstore items; after it burned in 1888, he rebuilt on the same site, and by early 1889 the new Goss block opened for business as an opera house despite Watertown already having two others.

Watertown, South Dakota · United States