“Hill City”

First laid out as a gold camp in February 1876 by Thomas Harvey, John Miller and Hugh McCullough, the rich strikes in the Northern Hills made it a deserted village by May 1876. Its deserted cabins had many transient occupants and the cabin that stood just behind this marker was last occupied by a family named Crippen. Prior to 1880 Samuel H. Coates and others came and needing a school, re-chinked the outside with mud, the inside with V-shaped slats and Coates taught the school. By the time of the Tin Discovery in 1883, Annie E. Tallent, the first woman to enter the Hills and its historian was the school teacher. Then in 1886 a new frame school was built alongside. The east end of the Coates house, also behind this marker was that first frame school.

Pennington County, Highway 16 across from school