Earlier this year, Helena along with husband, Rob, decided to sell the business they began more than 35 years ago near the entrance of the Pipestone National Monument.
“I love what I do but it is time,” Helena said. “It’s just time.”
The Carlsons said they have a buyer for the business, but the transaction has not closed and no details are available at this time.
A trip from their home near the Twin Cities to Pipestone in the 1970s for a performance of the Song of Hiawatha Pageant and to tour Pipestone National Monument led the Carlsons to consider opening a tourist business.
“I was just enthralled,” Helena said. “It was such a neat feeling.”
In 1977, the couple designed and constructed Fort Pipestone to focus on pioneer life and Native American culture that complimented the pageant and the history of pipestone. Helena said while the corner of Hiawatha Ave. and Ninth St. northeast was not an actual site of a former fort, Native Americans lived at the site while they quarried nearby. The Carlsons modeled their plans on an actual 1862 fort near Litchfield, a structure built the year of the U.S.-Dakota War.
The Carlsons hired a log cabin builder to construct the square facility that serves as the store, complete with log walls and exposed log beams in a rich medium brown color. She said natural wood gives visitors a warm feeling and an experience of what it may have been like living in a log cabin.
“Our original intent was to be a miniature Wall Drug,” Rob said.
Time and money hindered the couples’ vision, Helena said, for the construction of a town near the fort, complete with various shops and other tourist attractions similar to what is experienced in Wall, S.D.
“I like looking at all their stuff,” Rob added. “I like mounts and they have so many different mounts. I could walk around there for a day and a half looking at stuff.”
Displayed within Fort Pipestone are the mounts of mammals and other wildlife shot by Rob, Helena or one of the couple’s seven children. Rob shot one such mount, an enormous bison head that greets visitors as they enter the store. This item, he said, won’t go with the sale of the store. The rest of the mounts and all the current merchandise will be transferred to the new owner, Rob said.
When Fort Pipestone opened its doors in the late 70s, the Carlsons originally hired South Dakota artisans JoAnne and Gordon Bird to manage the store, who along with other artists, offered original Native American art for sale. With the Birds no longer interested in managing the store, Helena took over the managerial reins in 1985. While hesitant at first about her new role, she said she evolved the store into what she imagined.
“I’ve been able to do something that a lot of people didn’t think I would be able incorporate gifts along with the Native American and wildlife,” Helena said. “It flows together.”
Unsure how exactly she was able to accomplish the merge, Helena said she keeps her motto in mind: “Something for everyone in everyone’s price range.”
Pottery, clothing, shoes, wall art, stuffed animals and thousands of other items are displayed from the floor to the ceiling in the store that is open during the tourist season. She spends the off-season the third week of October through May 1, purchasing items for the following season.
Jewelry has been the store’s No. 1 seller that ranges from $1 rings for children to a one-of-a-kind adult necklace for $899. Rob said the second-best selling items are made from pipestone, which range from small animal carvings to a large selection of peace pipes carved by local artisans and about 15 other artists throughout the U.S.
Ten years ago, the couple expanded the gift shop with the addition of a two-story barn behind the store that was connected through a hallway. The barn more than doubled the store’s display area and the upstairs gave the couple more room for storage, Rob said.
The extra space is needed when the store is visited by busloads of school children who stop to view the fort primarily in May and again at the end of September. Between those months, Rob said hundreds of tourists visit the shop, with signatures in their guestbook coming from as far away as China, Japan and Chile.
When the Carlsons close Fort Pipestone for the final time currently scheduled for Oct. 20 Helena said they would spend time at their farm near Jasper and travel south during the winter months.
“My big thing is to read a good book during the daytime and not feel guilty that I should be doing something else,” she said.
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