A century after Wessington Springs College English Professor Emma Shay journeyed across the Atlantic in search of inspiration, the garden that grew from that trip continues to bloom on a hillside in Wessington Springs.
The Shakespeare Garden Society will celebrate that remarkable 100-year connection Sunday, Aug. 16, with a Garden Party and Anne Hathaway Cottage Open House from 4 to 6 p.m. at Shakespeare Garden.
The gathering will commemorate the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Shay’s 1926 trip to England — a journey that planted the seeds for what would become Shakespeare Garden — while also honoring Kathy Dean whose work helped ensure Mrs. Shay’s vision survived for generations to come.
Longtime Shakespeare Garden Society board member Kathy Dean is retiring after 37 years of service, much of it spent helping restore, maintain and breathe new life into the historic garden and cottage.
Light refreshments and background music will begin at 4 p.m., followed by a 5 p.m. program celebrating the beginnings, renovation and future of Shakespeare Garden. Those attending are encouraged to bring lawn chairs.
Today's Shakespeare Garden Society board includes Brenda Deines, Sharon Krueger, Angie Mentzer, Linda Boschee, Cindy Eilers, Janice Bender, Gwyneth Fastnacht, Susan Dean Arnott and Diane Winter — the latest caretakers in a story that has now stretched across a century.
For Dean, that story began rather innocently when she was asked to become involved in efforts to save the property.
'I said I'd do it if my friend Brenda Deines will,' Dean recalled. 'Neither one of us knew what we were getting into.'
What they were getting into was the preservation of one of Wessington Springs' most distinctive pieces of history.
A professor's journey
The story begins with Emma Freeland Shay, an English professor whose connection to Wessington Springs stretched back to the early years of Wessington Springs Seminary.
In 1926, at age 64, Shay borrowed $1,000 and traveled to England to deepen her knowledge of English literature and visit the places associated with the writers and poets she had spent a lifetime teaching. She traveled alone, collecting flowers, leaves, grasses and pieces of bark from the homes of literary figures along the way.
She returned to Wessington Springs with more than memories.
Shay and her students mounted the specimens she had collected into portfolios, which were sold for $5 each to repay the $1,000 loan that had financed her trip. More importantly, she came home with an idea.
OnShakespeare'sbirthday in April 1927, work began on a Shakespeare Garden on the Wessington Springs College campus. Shay, her husband, Clark, and her students transformed a rocky hillside into a garden inspired by the plants and flowers associated with Shakespeare and his works. Seeds and plants came from supporters around South Dakota, while programs and other events helped raise money for the developing garden.
It became a place meant not simply to grow flowers, but to bring literature to life on the South Dakota prairie.
When Emma and Clark Shay retired from teaching in 1932, they built a cottage beside the garden patterned after the English home of Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway. Builders reportedly worked from a postcard of the original cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon.
Emma Shay died in the cottage in 1945. Clark Shay died in 1951.
The garden continued under the care of the college and community for years, but Wessington Springs College closed in 1964. Its remaining college buildings were eventually demolished, leaving Shakespeare Garden and the Anne Hathaway Cottage as the last physical reminder of a campus that had once been an important part of the community.
The garden and cottage were placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.
Saving the garden
By the late 1980s, however, the property needed more than memories to sustain it.
A gift from the Dr. Roscoe Dean family in memory of Helen Hoy Dean, 1937 graduate of Wessington Springs College started the fundraising initiative to purchase the property from Daryl and Kathleen Balster and restore the Cottage and Garden.
In 1989, local residents organized the Shakespeare Garden Society and began an ambitious effort to acquire and restore the cottage and grounds. Kathy Dean, Brenda Deines, the late Roberta Unruh, Susan Dean Arnott and Mary Jane Dean Belz were at the heart of that effort. Wessington Springs College and Academy alumni and Wessington Springs High School alumni provided substantial support.
A South Dakota Centennial grant helped launch what would become years of restoration work. The garden was reclaimed and the cottage repaired, eventually receiving the thatched roof that Emma Shay had envisioned but never saw during her lifetime. Master thatcher Cecil White constructed the roof in the early 1990s and returned over the years to help maintain it.
For Dean, what began with agreeing to help if her friend would help, too, became nearly four decades of planting, weeding, planning, fundraising and preserving a place that easily could have disappeared.
And the work continues
High school ag students have been regular partners in spring and fall cleanup since 1989, volunteers gather each year to prepare and plant the garden, and younger generations are being introduced to it as well. A second-grade flower bed was established in 2024 through a project led by Gwyneth Fastnacht and Wessington Springs Elementary teacher Sarah Larson.
Today, the cottage and garden host visitors, teas, weddings, music and other gatherings, while the grounds remain open for visitors to walk and enjoy throughout the summer.
Sunday's Garden Party will celebrate all of those chapters at once: the professor who crossed an ocean 100 years ago with a flower press and an idea; the volunteers who refused to let her garden disappear decades later; and the people now entrusted with carrying it forward.
It is perhaps fitting for a place whose longtime motto comes from Shakespeare himself: “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”
And 100 years after Emma Shay set out for England, her little piece of Shakespeare's world is still growing on the South Dakota prairie.