When Syrians settled in Sioux Falls — new book details century-old settlers

By Jill Callison, for Pigeon605

In 1900, 36 Syrian Muslims and Christians made their home in a boarding house at 204 N. Phillips Ave.

All three dozen were peddlers, and within 15 years, many of them had established successful dry-goods stores.

The boarding house, which is long gone, likely also served as the first place in Sioux Falls where Muslims gathered to pray, according to an author and college professor who has researched the topic.

“Sioux Falls did not establish a mosque like Ross, North Dakota, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa, did,” said Edward E. Curtis IV, author of “Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest.” “But Muslims met to pray wherever they lived.”

Curtis will give a virtual lecture via Zoom on “Muslims of the Heartland” at 6:30 p.m. Wednesday through the American Islamic College. To register, click here.

Curtis, who was raised in southern Illinois, is the descendant of these immigrants. He has written 13 books; Publishers Weekly named “Muslims in America: A Short History” one of 2009’s best books.

Curtis’ book looks at Sioux Falls and Kadoka, among other Midwestern cities. One of the book’s main characters was born in Kadoka.

“Kadoka was not a true hub of Syrian life like the big town of Sioux Falls was,” Curtis said. “Immigrants came to Sioux Falls for the same reasons that American-born migrants did: the river and then the railroad made it one of the Midwest’s great centers of agribusiness. Sioux Falls needed workers.”

In 1889, Congress passed a law that effectively canceled the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie.

“Afterward, some of the Great Sioux Reservation, the ‘perpetual home’ of Lakota people, remained in Native hands, but a lot of it was seized for the purpose of homesteading. Syrians joined Scandinavians and other groups who were attracted to the western part of the state by the promise of these homesteads, which were available for free or a small fee,” Curtis said.

Syrian Muslims and Christians, like European Jews, peddled and established dry-goods stores in Sioux Falls. Peddling was essential to their success, Curtis said, but they were more likely to work in factories and other industrial jobs.

Two South Dakotans – James Abourezk and the late James Abdnor – were the first and second Lebanese-Americans to serve in the U.S. Senate. Curtis said their families are part of the ethnic group he talks of in his book.

“Two-thirds of the Syrian-Lebanese were Christian; one-third was Muslim,” he said. “The Christians among them were, for the most part, Antiochian Orthodox, Melkite, or Greek Catholic, and Maronite. The Muslims were both Sunni and Shia.”

When these immigrants arrived, they came from Ottoman Syria. After World War I, the British and French divided Ottoman Syria into four countries: Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan. Most of the Syrians in South Dakota were from the part of Syria that became Lebanon, Curtis said.

Over time, while some families stayed in South Dakota, others moved to Detroit, which became the largest Arab-American Muslim community in the Midwest, Curtis said. Others returned to Syria before World War I. The Syrian immigrants often praised their Scandinavian counterparts for being kind. The police and judiciary in Sioux Falls sometimes defended their rights, “but they also faced a lot of ethnic-racial and religious discrimination and violence until after World War II,” Curtis said.

During his research, Curtis learned about a Syrian dry farmer who introduced the “Syrian pea” to South Dakota. It was the garbanzo bean, the chickpea used to make the popular dip hummus. “I love that story,” Curtis said.

The book can be pre-ordered from New York University Press and Amazon.