Okay so Wall Drug is one of the cleanest possible case studies in how a specific piece of American roadside infrastructure gets produced by a stack of completely unrelated federal decisions and happens to be run by a Catholic pharmacist from Nebraska, and the reason it's interesting is that almost nobody who stops there has any idea any of the machinery underneath it exists. They just see the billboards. The billboards are the thing people experience. The billboards are not the thing.
Start with Ted Hustead. He buys the drug store in Wall, South Dakota in December 1931, which is a terrible time to buy anything. He's a pharmacist from Nebraska. He has a very specific requirement, which is that he will only open his pharmacy in a town that has a Catholic church β he's Catholic, he needs a parish β and Wall qualifies. The town has 326 people. Nobody has money. The store almost fails for five years. Then his wife Dorothy has the famous idea in summer 1936: put up signs on Route 16 advertising free ice water. It works instantly. By the end of that summer he's put up signs twenty miles out.
But here's the thing: the reason "free ice water on Route 16" worked as a value proposition is that Mount Rushmore was being carved between 1927 and 1941, and the dedication of Mount Rushmore as a federally-funded tourist destination produced, for the first time in the region's history, a continuous flow of Eastern and Midwestern tourists driving across the prairie to look at Gutzon Borglum's four presidents. Without Rushmore, nobody is driving that road. Route 16 was the road to Rushmore. Wall was on the way. The Badlands gets designated a national monument in 1939, which doubles the draw. Wall Drug is essentially a rest stop on a federally-produced tourism circuit that didn't exist before the Depression and wouldn't exist without Rushmore. Dorothy had the idea, Dorothy deserves the credit, and also the idea is only a good idea because the New Deal is, simultaneously, producing drive-to national monuments at scale.
The signage style is also borrowed from a specific source: Burma-Shave. The jingle-across-six-boards format β "GET A SODA / GET A ROOT BEER / TURN NEXT CORNER / JUST AS NEAR / TO HIGHWAY 16 AND 14 / FREE ICE WATER / WALL DRUG" β is directly modeled on the Burma-Shave highway campaign, which ran from 1925 to 1963 and was itself one of the first commercial uses of sequential billboard narrative in American advertising. Hustead says this openly in his memoir. He saw Burma-Shave, he copied the format, it worked. Which is interesting because Burma-Shave eventually died in 1963 when the interstate system made rural highways obsolete β you can't read six sequential signs at 70 mph β but Wall Drug adapted by going big-single-billboard instead and survived the transition that killed its model.
The other piece of federal machinery nobody talks about: Lady Bird Johnson's Highway Beautification Act of 1965. This bans most billboards along federal highways, which, if you applied it consistently, would have destroyed Wall Drug, because the whole business model is billboards. The actual implementation of the Act carved out massive exceptions for existing signs, for commercial and industrial zones, for specific state-level interpretations, and Wall Drug had, by that point, 3,000 signs in all 50 states and the political capital to keep most of them. The Act ended up banning roughly the competitors that hadn't yet scaled. Wall Drug was grandfathered into its own strategic moat.
Then I-90 gets built and in the late 1960s it bypasses Wall. This is the kind of thing that kills most small-town roadside businesses β the Midwest is littered with dead Main Streets that got bypassed by interstates β but Wall Drug responds by building an 80-foot brontosaurus visible from the highway, commissioning it from Emmet Sullivan, the same sculptor who did the Dinosaur Park in Rapid City. The brontosaurus is not whimsy. The brontosaurus is interstate-scale advertising infrastructure designed to pull drivers at 75 mph off at exit 110. It is, functionally, a 1960s billboard that happens to be a three-dimensional concrete dinosaur.
And then the military layer. Ellsworth Air Force Base is fifty miles west of Wall. The Air Force operated Minuteman II ICBM silos across western South Dakota from 1963 to the mid-1990s β Delta-01 and Delta-09 are preserved as a national historic site now β and the missileers and maintenance crews drove back and forth to Ellsworth along I-90. Wall Drug started giving them free coffee and doughnuts. They still do, for any active military. So for about thirty years one of the things Wall Drug structurally was, underneath the free ice water and the jackalopes and the cowboy kitsch, was a rest stop on the logistics route for the American nuclear deterrent. The silos are decommissioned now. The coffee tradition persists.
What I love about Wall Drug is that the received story β plucky pharmacist in the Depression has a sign idea, it works, American dream β is true and is also almost entirely downstream of federal infrastructure decisions the Husteads had nothing to do with. Mount Rushmore made the road. The Badlands designation fed the road. Burma-Shave provided the advertising grammar. The Highway Beautification Act grandfathered their moat. The Interstate built the bypass they had to beat with the brontosaurus. The Cold War provided the missileers who got the free doughnuts. Every element of the Wall Drug experience is a response to a specific federal action. The Husteads were talented operators of a business whose entire environment was produced by someone else.
Which is the thing, I think, about American small-business mythology generally. The plucky-individual narrative is real AND the infrastructure underneath it is real AND neither one cancels the other out. Ted Hustead is not a fake. Dorothy Hustead had a genuinely good idea. They also were standing on a continent's worth of federally-funded tourism circuit, advertising convention, highway law, and nuclear logistics, and the brontosaurus is pointing at all of it if you know how to look.
Also the bumper sticker says "Where the heck is Wall Drug?" which is a great piece of copy because the answer is genuinely nowhere, which is the whole point.