A couple years ago, we launched a new feature in South Dakota Magazine called “Tiny Towns.” The idea is to visit our state’s smallest communities (usually with fewer than 250 residents) and find interesting stories.

Perhaps the tiniest town we’ve visited so far is White Owl,acommunityofsixpeople in Meade County. One of those six citizens, Ann Shaw, runs theWhiteOwlCreekBoutique, which offers women’s fashions in the White Owl Store, a 120-year-old building that was the first Post Office in Meade County in 1893 and still serves thatpurposetoday.“Nothingis straight. It gives it character,” she told us about the building that once served as a stagecoach stop. “Nobody wants to see a building go downhill and we want to keep our post office alive.”

White Owl is also home to a podcast called Place Well Tended, hosted by Shaw’s sister-in-law Jodene Shaw and friend Molly Fulton. It’s an ongoing discussion about creativity, place, landscapes and South Dakotans. “Where I live is considered the middle of nowhere and yet there are people doing incredible things,” Jodene says.

Another one of those people is Bill Lampman, who oversees the amazing museum in Pickstown (pop. 225, Charles Mix County.) Pickstown was created between 1946 and 1949 to house the workers constructing Fort Randall Dam and their families. As many as 3,150 people lived there in 1950, but after the dam was finished 1956manyofthemmovedaway to work on other federal projects. Still, the people who grew up there remain a tight-knit group dedicated to preserving Pickstown’s heyday. The museum, housed inside the community’s old Rainbow Room, has an extensive collection of memorabilia from the dam’s construction, a portion of the school’s gym floor and shows a 15-minute documentary narratedbyperhapsthetown’s most recognizable resident, Tom Brokaw.

When we visited Agar (pop. 82, Sully County), we learned about the Fernando, a huge summertime event named for Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela that ran from1980to2000.Theweekend included a pig roast, car raffle and what he called a “wild and wooly” street dance. As many as 14 teams would play in the tournament with spectators parked around the field. “Lots of windshields got broken,” Mikkelsen admitted. Eventually theplayersandorganizers got older, and the tournament faded into legend.

We have plenty of other tiny towns on the list to explore, including Stockholm, Hosmer, Davis and others. If we’ve learned anything in our travels, it’s that just because these places are tiny doesn’t mean they’re not interesting.

John Andrews is the editor of South Dakota Magazine, a bi-monthly publication that explores the people and places of our great state. For more information, visit www.southdakotamagazine. com.