Dig into History at Center for Western Studies in Sioux Falls

If you love digging into history,  I'd highly recommend spending a few hours at the Center for Western Studies on the campus at Augustana University. For thirty dollars, you can sort through donated collections of documents, photos and scrapbooks that depict life anywhere from Sioux Falls to the entire Midwest.

Having a day off recently,  I booked an appointment at the center, called my parents to see if they'd join me and we embarked on three hours of going through photos of  Sioux Falls, World War Two era newsletters from the Air base, record albums and family heirloom artifacts.

When you go, bring a magnifying glass if you have one.  Those tiny details in the photos are fun to pick out.  You'll request one collection at a time, which Collection Assistant Elizabeth Thrond or other staff will deliver to your table.

It is amazing how fast the hours fly by.  Copies of photos are available for $30 each and photocopies of papers are 30 cents each. A small portion of the archives are now digital and online where you can peruse the collection at home on your computer.

Your heirloom documents can be archived on site for future visitors to see.  Rather than having old pictures, letters and other items sitting in a box that you'll only see every few years, they can have a new life at the Center for Western Studies.

Thrond describes her favorite collection in the center and surprisingly it isn't photographs, but a collection of love letters between a woman teaching in Iowa and a man farming in South Dakota.