Could South Dakota be home to the proposed Garden of Heroes?

South Dakota might be right at the heart of a fun idea to celebrate American history as we head into the nation's semiquincentennial: the National Garden of American Heroes. The idea itself has been around for a few years, but a new offer of Black Hills land in Keystone, SD via Governor Larry Rhoden might be the catalyst needed to actually bring this garden to life.

Lewis & Clark (as seen at Sioux City's Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center) are two proposed statues for the Garden

In 2020, President Trump proposed a "Garden of Heroes" and set up a task force and offered some ideas of who might be captured in statue form in EO 13934. In this initial order about the Garden of Heroes, he suggested:

"The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of John Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Daniel Boone, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Henry Clay, Davy Crockett, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Benjamin Franklin, Billy Graham, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, Christa McAuliffe, Audie Murphy, George S. Patton, Jr., Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross, Antonin Scalia, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, and Orville and Wilbur Wright."

A later order in 2021, EO 13978, expanded the list to 250 "heroes" with a goal of completion by the nation's 250th birthday: 

“The National Garden should be composed of statues, including statues of Ansel Adams, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Muhammad Ali, Luis Walter Alvarez, Susan B. Anthony, Hannah Arendt, Louis Armstrong, Neil Armstrong, Crispus Attucks, John James Audubon, Lauren Bacall, Clara Barton, Todd Beamer, Alexander Graham Bell, Roy Benavidez, Ingrid Bergman, Irving Berlin, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Norman Borlaug, William Bradford, Herb Brooks, Kobe Bryant, William F. Buckley, Jr., Sitting Bull, Frank Capra, Andrew Carnegie, Charles Carroll, John Carroll, George Washington Carver, Johnny Cash, Joshua Chamberlain, Whittaker Chambers, Johnny “Appleseed” Chapman, Ray Charles, Julia Child, Gordon Chung-Hoon, William Clark, Henry Clay, Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain), Roberto Clemente, Grover Cleveland, Red Cloud, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Nat King Cole, Samuel Colt, Christopher Columbus, Calvin Coolidge, James Fenimore Cooper, Davy Crockett, Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Miles Davis, Dorothy Day, Joseph H. De Castro, Emily Dickinson, Walt Disney, William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Jimmy Doolittle, Desmond Doss, Frederick Douglass, Herbert Henry Dow, Katharine Drexel, Peter Drucker, Amelia Earhart, Thomas Edison, Jonathan Edwards, Albert Einstein, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duke Ellington, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Medgar Evers, David Farragut, the Marquis de La Fayette, Mary Fields, Henry Ford, George Fox, Aretha Franklin, Benjamin Franklin, Milton Friedman, Robert Frost, Gabby Gabreski, Bernardo de Gálvez, Lou Gehrig, Theodor Seuss Geisel, Cass Gilbert, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Glenn, Barry Goldwater, Samuel Gompers, Alexander Goode, Carl Gorman, Billy Graham, Ulysses S. Grant, Nellie Gray, Nathanael Greene, Woody Guthrie, Nathan Hale, William Frederick “Bull” Halsey, Jr., Alexander Hamilton, Ira Hayes, Hans Christian Heg, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Henry, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Billie Holiday, Bob Hope, Johns Hopkins, Grace Hopper, Sam Houston, Whitney Houston, Julia Ward Howe, Edwin Hubble, Daniel Inouye, Andrew Jackson, Robert H. Jackson, Mary Jackson, John Jay, Thomas Jefferson, Steve Jobs, Katherine Johnson, Barbara Jordan, Chief Joseph, Elia Kazan, Helen Keller, John F. Kennedy, Francis Scott Key, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., Russell Kirk, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Henry Knox, Tadeusz Kościuszko, Harper Lee, Pierre Charles L'Enfant, Meriwether Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Vince Lombardi, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Clare Boothe Luce, Douglas MacArthur, Dolley Madison, James Madison, George Marshall, Thurgood Marshall, William Mayo, Christa McAuliffe, William McKinley, Louise McManus, Herman Melville, Thomas Merton, George P. Mitchell, Maria Mitchell, William “Billy” Mitchell, Samuel Morse, Lucretia Mott, John Muir, Audie Murphy, Edward Murrow, John Neumann, Annie Oakley, Jesse Owens, Rosa Parks, George S. Patton, Jr., Charles Willson Peale, William Penn, Oliver Hazard Perry, John J. Pershing, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Poling, John Russell Pope, Elvis Presley, Jeannette Rankin, Ronald Reagan, Walter Reed, William Rehnquist, Paul Revere, Henry Hobson Richardson, Hyman Rickover, Sally Ride, Matthew Ridgway, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Caesar Rodney, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Betsy Ross, Babe Ruth, Sacagawea, Jonas Salk, John Singer Sargent, Antonin Scalia, Norman Schwarzkopf, Junípero Serra, Elizabeth Ann Seton, Robert Gould Shaw, Fulton Sheen, Alan Shepard, Frank Sinatra, Margaret Chase Smith, Bessie Smith, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jimmy Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Gilbert Stuart, Anne Sullivan, William Howard Taft, Maria Tallchief, Maxwell Taylor, Tecumseh, Kateri Tekakwitha, Shirley Temple, Nikola Tesla, Jefferson Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Thorpe, Augustus Tolton, Alex Trebek, Harry S. Truman, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Dorothy Vaughan, C. T. Vivian, John von Neumann, Thomas Ustick Walter, Sam Walton, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, John Washington, John Wayne, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Phillis Wheatley, Walt Whitman, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Roger Williams, John Winthrop, Frank Lloyd Wright, Orville Wright, Wilbur Wright, Alvin C. York, Cy Young, and Lorenzo de Zavala.”

Congress never approved funding, and President Biden rescinded these orders with an order of his own, EO 14029. But upon resuming office in 2025, Trump issued another order, EO 14189 which reinstated his two previous orders about the Garden of Heroes. However, in this third order, he amended the completion date from a goal of being done before July 4th, 2026, to "as expeditiously as possible," which seems a lot more practical considering that no progress was made on this project during the Biden term. 

And in mid-March 2025, forward movement on this project may finally be happening: a site in Keystone, South Dakota has been offered to be used as the home of the Garden of Heroes. According to South Dakota Governor Larry Rhoden, a private landowner offered land for the garden, not far from the Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse memorials. They also originally offered the land via then-South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem (now Secretary of Homeland Security) during Trump's first term. And Rhoden's in support of this plan, formally and publicly offering it to the Trump Administration for use for the Garden of Heroes on March 18th, 2025. 

South Dakota's Representative in the U.S. House of Representatives, Dusty Johnson, posted on X that "This is an important project. I've been talking to the White House for two months about this because we need to make this happen." 

Rhoden agreed, sharing Rep. Johnson's post and adding that "Together we can hopefully get this project across the finish line to celebrate America's heroes in the beautiful Black Hills."

The proposed Keystone site for the Garden of American Heroes is a 40-acre parcel of land less than 3 miles from Mount Rushmore and owned by Chuck Lien of the Lien mining family. The location seems like a great fit, considering that Rapid City and Keystone already have great tourism infrastructure and are already a draw for tourists looking for statues commemorating famous Americans like Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, and downtown Rapid City's presidential statues (they have one for every former U.S. President through Obama.) I'm a big fan of Rapid City area myself, and you can check out my post about the best free fun in Rapid City for some of the other great local fun there. But the Trump administration hasn't publicly announced acceptance or rejection of the potential Keystone site, so we will have to wait and see if it really happens or not. 

If they do, I'd suggest the planners stop by Trinity Heights here in Sioux City for some inspiration! I think it really is one of the best statuary parks in the US, and the combination of full-scale statues and plaques could be a great model to follow to get something done and able to be opened to the public in less than a year. 250 statues in one year seems like a tall order, but maybe they will make it happen. We'll hope!

If the National Garden of American Heroes does end up in South Dakota, it'd be an easy trip for Siouxland families, and it seems likely that many potential visitors will go through Sioux City on their way (especially if they are traveling between the Garden of Heroes and the Iowa State Fairgrounds, if the Great American State Fair happens as proposed!), which will be pretty fun for both us locals and for the travelers passing through.

Would you go see the garden if they build it in the Rapid City area? Which statues would you be most excited to see?