The stone clock tower of the old Minnehaha County courthouse looms over the low-slung landscape of Sioux Falls. It’s no longer the tallest building in South Dakota’s largest city, but it remains the most recognizable one, and there are still some people who recall when it was the administrative hub of the region, from the 1890s through the 1950s. “A lot of people remember coming here when it was still a functioning courthouse,” says local historian Shelly Sjovold, “but most of the time it was when they were very young, and they first got their drivers’ licenses. That’s where you did things like that.”
I visited the old courthouse on a very different errand: to research my new book The Divorce Colony: How Women Revolutionized Marriage and Found Freedom on the American Frontier. I was looking for any evidence that still remains in the city from the time when Sioux Falls was home to scores of unhappy spouses, many of whom had traveled more than a thousand miles to end their marriages. I was looking for the remnants of what 19th-century journalists came to call the “divorce colony.”
Divorce was the culture war of turn-of-the-century United States, and laws varied wildly from state to state. In South Carolina, there were no provisions for divorce at all. In New York, adultery was the only legal justification. South Dakota, on the other hand, had some of the most lenient laws in the country and one of the shortest residency requirements. In 1891, when prominent East Coast socialites began to arrive, one had to live in the young state for just three months to fall under the jurisdiction of its courts—a holdover from territorial days when the government was eager to welcome arriving white settlers. Sioux Falls, served by five railway lines and the Cataract House, the nicest hotel for hundreds of miles, became a “Mecca for the mismated,” according to the Pittsburgh Daily Post. It was the setting for soap opera–worthy plots that played out on the nation’s front pages—and a flashpoint in the country’s fiery debate over who should be allowed to end a marriage and why.
The Sioux Falls divorce colony marked a real and important turning point in the country’s social history, but, “I’m not going to say it’s viewed as folklore, but it is sort of treated like that, a little bit,” says Sjovold, collections assistant at the Siouxland Heritage Museums. “A lot of people know we were called that, but they don’t really know the whole story.”
