Heritage Park

Heritage Park was located on Augustana’s campus — south of 33rd Street, between Grange and Prairie Avenues — for many years. It was home to a collection of historic buildings, built in our region of the Great Plains during the late 19th to early 20th century.

One of the oldest churches established in Lincoln County, the Beaver Creek Lutheran Church was completed in 1892, in LaValley Township, east of Sioux Falls. The architectural style is Vernacular Gothic Revival, which attempts to combine European attributes with the prairie experience. The church is made almost entirely of wood — the main building material available on the prairie at the time. As the rural population declined, the church's congregation voted to close its doors in 1978. The church was then offered to Augustana, and was moved to Heritage Park in 1985.

An example of early South Dakota educational facilities, the Eggers School House was built in 1909 on an acre of land near Renner Corner. After serving as the daily social gathering place for an average of 15 students for nearly 50 years, only four children were enrolled in 1957. The school eventually closed and was purchased and preserved by James Wehde, a former student at the school.

In 2022, both the Beaver Creek Lutheran Church and Eggers School House were moved to Harrisburg, South Dakota, to become a part of the Meadow Barn and Country Apple Orchard.

The Berdahl-Rolvaag House was named for the Berdahl family, built in 1883, and for author Ole Rolvaag (1876 -1931) — a Norwegian immigrant, whose novels Giants in the Earth, Peder Victorious and Their Fathers God tell the stories of Norwegian immigrants who came to the area in the 1870s. Rolvaag, a 1901 graduate of the Augustana Academy in Canton, South Dakota, married Jennie Berdahl while she was living in this house with her parents.

The house is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Once a part of Heritage Park on Augustana's campus, the house was relocated to the Threshing Bee Grounds in Granite, Iowa, in September 2022. According to the Granite Gazette, "The house stands as a modest but proud tribute to the many immigrant pioneers who settle this part of the country at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries."

The Rolvaag Writing Cabin, where the best-selling Giants in the Earth, called a "moving narrative of pioneer hardship and heroism," by Atlantic Monthly, was written between September and October 1923, was a gift from the Rolvaag family. The cabin stood on U.S. Forest Service land on Big Island Lake in northern Minnesota, and faced destruction if the cabin wasn't moved. Two Finnish carpenters dismantled the cabin and reassembled it in Heritage Park.

The writing cabin was relocated in 2022 to another location on Augustana's campus — near the Fryxell Humanities Center.