DE SMET — Marian Cramer said she never intended to be a writer.

But during her lifetime she has written and published hundreds of pages. And earlier in February, the South Dakota State Historical Society accepted her donation of articles, newspaper and magazine clippings, audio and VHS tapes, oral histories and more.

Matthew Reitzel, historical society manuscript archivist, said the donation is quite significant because of the variety and the scope of the material it contains and as a representation of how authors in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s got things published.

He noted that social media now allows everyone to get their writings published without filter.

It wasn’t always that way.

Editors at various publications judged whether something was worthy of print. Not everything made the cut.

Cramer said she’s always had an interest in history.

“I was born with it, I think. I was always interested,” Cramer said. She remembers writing stories about her family history while in elementary school. She said they also learned a new poem every month.

Cramer was born near Frankfort in 1934 and attended rural school in Spink County. She attended Redfield High School and graduated from Tulare High School. She married Delmar Cramer in 1954 and they had three children, Roger, Laurie and Leanne.

They lived and farmed in the Spirit Lake area northwest of De Smet.

She taught music in Willow Lake for 35 years, has been involved with the Laura Ingalls Wilder Pageant for years and has served on its board of directors since 1995. She wrote a couple of pageant scripts and a couple of other plays. Those scripts are in the archived collection.

In addition, Cramer played organ at the Spirit Lake Presbyterian Church for some 60 years. She plays organ yet at the De Smet Good Samaritan Center where she resides.

One of her greatest loves is the time she spent hosting tourists at the Prairie School, which now sits on the southwest edge of the Ingalls Homestead. Cramer began “teaching” at the school in 1986 and was there until just a few years ago. She said she loved telling visiting kids what a rural school was like in pioneer times.

Cramer also presented annual papers on a variety of topics for more than 40 years at the Center for Western Studies History Conference in Sioux Falls.

Getting her collection into the state archives was a process that began in 2020. Reitzel said that in July 2022 he went to De Smet and met with Marian and Leanne about the intended donation and brought it back to Pierre. It was only recently that the donation was formally accepted.

He was pleased that Cramer had collated and edited the intended donation. He said it makes the historical society’s job a lot easier.

Many intended donations are just boxes of material the family wants do deposit after the author dies.

“It’s always better collection-wise if someone like Marian goes through things themselves,” Reitzel said.

Collections like Cramer’s are available for public use. The research room at the historical society is currently undergoing renovation and will not be open again until next year. Once renovations are complete, people can go to the research room to look through the archives at their leisure.

Meanwhile, someone interested in specific material can go to the society’s website, do an online search and request copies from the society. But he said there are limits to how much they can copy.

“It’s a box and a half of things from Marian. So we can’t provide copies of everything,” Reitzel said.