SOUTH DAKOTA LEGENDS

Lucretia "Aunt Lou" Marchbanks -

       The Greatest Cook in the Black Hills

Except for "Aunt Sally” Campbell who came with the Custer Expedition in 1874, most believe that Lucretia Marchbanks was the first black woman in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Born a slave in Putman County, Tennessee on March 25, 1832, Lucretia belonged to a slave owner named Martin Marchbanks, whose father had settled east of Algood, Tennessee. Lucretia's father was half African American and half white and the half brother of Martin Marchbanks. Before the Civil War even began, her father was able to purchase his freedom for $700, which he had spent years very carefully saving.

Lucretia, the oldest of eleven children, grew up on the Marchbanks plantation where she was trained in cooking and housekeeping. She was "given” to Marchbanks’ oldest daughter who she traveled west with prior to the Civil War. Once she was freed by the Emancipation Proclamation, Lucretia continued to travel, spending time in California, before returning to her home in Tennessee.

However, having gotten a taste of the West, she soon headed that way again, working in the gold camps of Colorado before being lured by the reports of gold in the Black Hills. Arriving in Deadwood on June 1, 1876, she soon found work as the Kitchen Manager in the Grand Central Hotel.  In no time, the hotel, which really wasn’t so grand, was better known for the great food served in its restaurant and Lucretia had become better known as "Aunt Lou” in Deadwood Gulch.
 

On another occasion during a festival to raise money for the Congregational Church in 1880, the prize of a diamond ring was raffled off and given to the most popular woman in the Black Hills. Though many popular white women were her competed against her for the honor, men and women alike voted for Aunt Lou, who easily won the coveted prize.

Continuing to accumulate her hard earned money, Aunt Lou decided that she had cooked long enough and sold the Rustic Hotel in 1885 to a Mrs. A.M. Porter. She soon purchased a ranch in between Sundance and Beulah, Wyoming. There, she was actively engaged in raising horses and cattle with the help of a hired a man named George Baggely, who worked for her for the next twenty years.

Lucretia "Aunt Lou” Marchbanks died in 1911 and is buried in the little cemetery in Beulah, Wyoming.

© Kathy Weiser/Legends of America, updated September, 2008

Also See:

The DeSmet Gold Stamp Mill.

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