PIONEER HALL: BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE

It is the largest and most widely-used building in the freeman community, and how it came to be is remarkable. 

A story told by Courier Publisher Jeremy Waltner in special partnership with heritage hall museum & archives

When the ladies of the Freeman community gathered on May 12, 1950 for a mother-daughter banquet hosted by the Freeman Junior College Women’s Auxiliary, there must have been an underlying murmur of excitement and flutter of wonder.

That’s because the 450 attending were in a mint-new, strikingly imposing building the likes of which Freeman had never seen. Even to this day, three-quarters of a century later, the community hasn’t been christened with another multi-purpose structure that has generated such widespread use as Pioneer Hall.

This week marks the 75th anniversary of the dedication of what was then, and still is today, the largest building at Freeman Academy. It was dedicated on May 28, 1950 — two weeks after that mother-daughter banquet — and three months after that, nearly 2,500 people gathered there as the local Mennonite churches hosted the 1950 triennial national meeting of the General Conference Mennonite Church. It was the first public event that saw simultaneous use of Pioneer Hall’s two signature spaces: An auditorium with a full stage that could hold more well over 1,000 people — large enough for a college-sized basketball court — and a full basement and kitchen capable of serving as many as 550 guests.

“Here they have this new kitchen, new place to feed people — strategically brilliant,” says Marnette D. Hofer, a local historian who serves as executive director and archivist at Heritage Hall Museum & Archives. “This became then the place that you wanted to go. That mother-daughter banquet was the perfect market to show this off.”

Pioneer Hall was built largely on the backs of volunteer labor and grew out of a post-World War II push by Freeman Junior College and Academy to explore continued growth on a campus that was established as South Dakota Mennonite College in 1900 and had evolved considerably throughout the first half of the 20th century.

The need to accommodate a growing industrial arts program and the need for a larger college bookshop — coupled with the War Assets Administration’s decision to sell buildings off the Sioux Falls Air Base to schools at a significantly discounted cost — triggered conversations about building a new, unnamed structure on campus in the middle and later part of the 1940s.

Doing so would solve several challenges.

1. It would allow the school to vacate the low-slung brick building that had been built as the school’s gymnasium/auditorium in 1923, thus freeing up space for a mechanics and shop program that had been freed up because post-war restrictions had been lifted. That building, which would come to be known as the Tieszen Industrial Arts — or IA — building, was demolished in 2007 to make way for Sterling Hall in 2008.

2. It would create new lobby space for what had become a severely crowded and inefficient bookshop located on the first floor of Memorial Hall — the school’s administration building built in 1926 that is still in use today;

3. And it would allow for a large auditorium for both basketball games and community gatherings, as well as a good-sized dining hall to better accommodate students that had been taking their meals from the basement of the wood-framed dorm built in 1906 — a building that was removed in 1966 following the construction of Frontier Hall.

In June of 1947, the school purchased three buildings from the War Assets Administration, including a fully-furnished wooden theater in the amount of $946 — an 80% discount. Four months later, the buildings were dismantled and moved to Freeman, with the materials from the theater used for construction of the still-unnamed auditorium and dining hall and the two other buildings — both barracks — used for student housing.

Construction began in the spring of 1948 and continued through the following year, with the name “Pioneer Hall” unveiled on a concrete plaque at the front of the structure in October of 1949. The lights went on for the first time two months later and the heating system was installed in January of 1950. And by May, Pioneer Hall was ready to host its first events — that Freeman Junior College Auxiliary Mother-Daughter Banquet and the summer meeting of the General Conference Mennonite Church.

And while Pioneer Hall was built primarily to serve Freeman Junior College and Academy, it quickly became the go-to place for the larger community, hosting meetings, banquets, programs, concerts, theater productions and special events.

“It was the community center,” said Hofer, a 1983 graduate of Freeman Academy and 1985 graduate of Freeman Junior College. “That seemed to be where things happened; all of a sudden there was this big place that not only could seat people for a meeting, but you could feed them all.”

Speaking of feeding people, in 1959 Pioneer Hall became the epicenter for a little festival called Schmeckfest, a celebration of the 10-year anniversary of the Freeman Junior College Women’s Auxiliary, which was established in 1949 to take on its first project — the furnishing of the Pioneer Hall kitchen.

As Schmeckfest grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the value of Pioneer Hall became all the more obvious.

“It wasn’t just for a family reunion or a school function, it was used by the community,” says Tim L. Waltner, a retired publisher of the Freeman Courier who works closely with Hofer as part of the staff at Heritage Hall Museum & Archives. “As long as there was a college, the community was more likely to embrace the campus. Freeman Junior College was something everybody could get behind.”

But even more than that, Waltner said, “it was a monopoly. There was no other place. There simply wasn’t an alternative, and once that got established, people just got in the habit of using it and it just kep rolling.”

Improvements and changes came to Pioneer Hall over time.

In 1986, following the closure of Freeman Junior College, the bookshop located in the lobby of the main floor was converted into the Freeman Academy art room, and in 1988 the building’s brick exterior was covered with a three-inch Styrofoam insulation and Dryvit — a stucco-like, concrete-based finishing — to help protect the structure from the elements and dramatically altered its look.

And in 2000 the main lobby saw a major overhaul that included the addition of restroom facilities and a general updated look.

But the heartbeat of the building remains the same in 2025 as it was in 1950, even if it has been altered slightly by the addition of Sterling Hall in 2008.

Indeed, it is hard to imagine Freeman without Pioneer Hall, and when looking closer at the events that led to its construction — and the way in which it was built — it becomes one of the most remarkable stories in the history of the community.

More about that, next week.

This series is being produced in partnership with Heritage Hall Museum & Archives, which has provided a wealth of information through various resources, as well as a host of historic photos. If anybody has memories or reflections of Pioneer Hall — either the building process or otherwise — they are encouraged to contact The Courier as soon as possible. Email courier@gwtc.net or call/text Publisher Jeremy Waltner at 605-351-6097.