(side one)
Streets and alleys were paved with stone well into the 20th century. Between 1892 and 1916, 17 contracts were awarded to pave 50 blocks of local streets. Within a few years, the stones were paved over or torn up. Complaints arose about noise and about horses floundering when the stones became wet.
Two nearby residents, Joe Kirby and John Randolph, privately contracted for this stretch of paving stones. Today it shows how streets paved with stone were built in early Sioux Falls.
(side two)
In 1888, a year after the development of a great deposit of quartzite near Sioux Falls, newly opened quarries delivered stone to pave Philips Avenue, the city's first hard-surfaced street. Paving stones were a vast improvement of dirt streets with mud wallows.
A booming quarrying industry furnished paving stones for Sioux Falls, Chicago, Detroit, St. Louis, and other cities. Skillful stonecutters recruited from England, Scotland, and Wales cut thousands of paving blocks from the 1.7-billion-year-old Precambrian rock.
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