The Drugstore That Gave Away Free Ice Water

The Wall and the Town

The signs come first, before the town, before the exit ramp. They stand along Interstate 90 in letters that carry over the gravel and the grass — WALL DRUG, FREE ICE WATER, HOMESTYLE PIE — and they repeat themselves for so many miles that by the time the exit appears, the traveler feels personally summoned. This is the first thing to understand about Wall, South Dakota: the town has been calling out to the road for so long that the calling has become part of the landscape.

Wall sits on the high shortgrass prairie of western South Dakota, where the land begins its long argument with the sky. To the south, the ground breaks open into the badlands — gullies and spires of cream and rust-colored earth, a country that looks as though a dull knife had carved it and no one had smoothed the cuts. The settlement took its name from that edge. The wall, the first ranchers and railroad men called it, the sudden drop of the prairie into broken country, and the name stuck to the buildings that grew up at its lip.

It is a small town by any honest measure. A few blocks of Main Street. A grain elevator. The railroad tracks that gave the place its first reason to exist, and the interstate that gave it its second. The wind has the run of the town; it arrives from somewhere far off and does not apologize for the distance. In summer the heat comes up off the wall in waves. In winter the cold comes down off the same wall, only slower.

This is ranch country and wheat country, and the people who stay through the winters say that Wall is the kind of place a person leaves to find work and comes back to raise children — except that something happened here in the hard years of the thirties that bent that rule. A small thing. A cheap thing. A glass of water.

Free Ice Water

In 1931 a young pharmacist named Ted Hustead bought the drugstore on Wall's Main Street and moved his wife, Dorothy, and their young daughter into rooms behind the shop. The timing was terrible. The Depression had the country by the throat, and western South Dakota had it worse than most: drought, dust, grasshoppers, and the long heat. The highway ran past the front door, carrying travelers toward the Black Hills and the west, but they did not stop. Wall was a name on a map, a few blocks of buildings, a place to slow down and then speed back up.

By the summer of 1936 the store was failing by inches. The heat that year settled over the prairie and stayed. One Sunday in July, with the street empty and the air pressing at the window glass, Dorothy Hustead proposed the thing that saved them. They had ice. They had water. Signs on the highway, signs saying the water was free.

Ted was a practical man, and the plan sounded like a joke. But he went out with paint and board, put up signs along the road, and came back to wait. According to the family story, the first cars turned off before the day was out. Men in shirtsleeves. Women with sunburned arms. Children with dust in their hair, desperate for anything cold. The drugstore's fountain became the coldest room in the county. The water was free. The ice cream and the sandwiches and the aspirin were not.

Ted Hustead never stopped putting out signs. A few more each year, each one farther from town than the last, on fence posts, at crossroads, in ditches along the pull-offs. The signs announced the one thing Wall had that the road did not: cold water, free, a few miles ahead.

It worked because it was true. That is the part people forget about the famous roadside come-on. The water was cold. It was free. The town was hot, the travelers were thirsty, and in the middle of the Depression two people had figured out that the way to make a small town survive was to give the world something it actually needed, even if the something was only a drink.

The Store That Outgrew the Word

Wall Drug has long since outgrown the word drugstore. It is a village of rooms that wander into one another — a restaurant with counters that keep moving all afternoon, shops that sell boots and postcards and everything a person might carry home from the West, walls covered with old photographs and the relics of the road. The sign out front still makes the same promise it made in 1936. The ice water is still free.

On a July afternoon the parking lots fill with motor coaches and motorcycles and station wagons, and the license plates read like a roll call of the states. Families move through the aisles, eat pie at the counter, buy the improbable, and carry it back to their cars. The five-cent coffee passed into the legend along with the water, and each summer day the rooms fill and empty and fill again, as busy as any place on the plains.

The wonder of the place is that it never stopped being a small-town business. It is enormous, but it feels homemade, and it is still run by the family that started it. The Husteads kept thinking like people who had once needed a lucky break, and the lucky break never stopped arriving.

And the signs kept spreading. Over the years they have turned up, according to the accumulated lore of the place, far beyond South Dakota — on walls and roadsides and in photographs from half a world away. The exact number is a matter of legend, and legend is the appropriate unit of measurement. Somewhere an old board is still leaning against a fence post, telling a thirsty stranger that Wall is ahead, the water is cold, and the town is waiting.

The Water Still Runs

In winter the interstate still rushes past, but the parking lots empty and the wind has the town to itself. The drugstore settles into the quiet of any Main Street business in a small town, and Wall returns to what it was before the road found it.

This is the part of the story that matters for the small towns that line the highways of the West. Every one of them has faced the same arithmetic. The highway carries the world past at speed, and the town must offer the world a reason to slow down. Wall found its reason in the cheapest commodity available, and it has been pouring that commodity ever since.

On a summer evening the last tour buses pull out of the lots, heading west toward the hills. The badlands wall runs south of town in bands of pale stone, catching the late light. The signs are out on the interstate, doing their quiet work. And inside the drugstore, the water is still running cold. It cost almost nothing to give away, and it has been given away for nearly a century now, and what it bought was not a fortune, though the fortune came. It bought a small town's survival, out on a wind-scoured stretch of prairie where survival was never guaranteed.

That is the whole trick of Wall, South Dakota. It gave the road a drink, and the road never forgot the favor.