Why Spearfish's Newest Restaurant Is Named After Six Goats That Escaped in 1924

In 1924, Custer State Park brought six Rocky Mountain goats over from Alberta and penned them in a small enclosure, hoping to start a herd. Two slipped the fence on the very first night. By 1929, the rest had followed, scattering into the granite country around Black Elk Peak about ten miles northwest, where they climbed, multiplied, and became one of those stories every Black Hills native has heard secondhand at least once.

A century later, that story has a street address. Six Goats Tavern opened in April this year at 701 N 5th Street in downtown Spearfish, and the escape is the whole reason for the name. It is also, if you know where to look, a decent way to read what is actually happening on Main Street right now, not just at this one address but up and down the four-block historic core the tavern sits inside.

A General Store, a Boarding House, and Now a Steakhouse

The building Six Goats occupies did not start as a restaurant. William Lown built it in 1893 as his general store, using native Sundance sandstone quarried from Higgins Gulch and nearby Lookout Mountain, and for seventy years the Lown family ran it as Lown's, best known around town for its candy counter. That run ended in 1963.

What happened after is the more interesting part. The building spent time as a hotel with a downstairs restaurant, bar, lobby, and library, and over a dozen guest rooms upstairs sharing a single bathroom. It later served mostly as a boarding house before being converted to retail space in the 1960s, at which point its original sandstone facade was covered over entirely. It stayed covered for roughly three decades. A 1990s renovation stripped that covering off, restored the original front, and turned the ground floor back into a restaurant space. Today it stands as the only remaining two-story false-fronted downtown building constructed before 1900, one of 24 contributing properties in the Spearfish Historic Commercial District, which has held a spot on the National Register of Historic Places since 1975.

Six Goats Tavern is owned and operated by Brad Prescott and Chris Panaia, with the day-to-day handled under Badlands Hospitality Management, a firm that specializes in reviving landmark locations across the Black Hills rather than building new ones from scratch. That distinction matters more than it sounds. A building that spent thirty years hidden under retail siding does not get its sandstone back by accident. Someone has to want the history badly enough to pay for it, and that appetite is showing up more than once on this stretch of downtown.

Berlin Made the Same Bet Two Years Earlier

A few blocks over on West Jackson Boulevard, in the former Sanford's Grub and Pub space tucked behind Killian's and Dough Trader Pizza, Berlin opened in August 2024 serving German-American food. It is not a first-time restaurateur's leap of faith. Owner Mickey Staeckeler already runs The Sled Haus in Lead, and general manager Austin Marlow has described the Spearfish location as an attempt to bring an elevated version of what worked in Lead, adding that they wanted to step the whole experience up rather than repeat the Lead formula exactly.

Line those two stories up and a pattern starts to show. Neither Six Goats nor Berlin is a local first-timer testing an idea. Both are established Black Hills operators, one already running hospitality properties across the region, one already running a proven restaurant thirty minutes away in Lead, choosing to put their next investment specifically into downtown Spearfish's older building stock. That is a different kind of growth than a strip of new construction attracting national chains. It is existing operators betting on a finite set of century-old storefronts because the buildings themselves are part of the draw.

The Real Ceiling Isn't Demand, It's Storefronts

Here is the part a quick restaurant roundup usually misses. The Spearfish Historic Commercial District covers about 14 acres and 24 contributing buildings, and sixteen of those predate 1911. That is the entire inventory of structures built with the ceiling heights, masonry, and layout that let a modern kitchen and dining room move in without gutting the historic character that makes the address worth having in the first place. Killian's, at 539 W Jackson Boulevard, already occupies one of those slots with a full bar and a rotating 17-tap beer lineup. Dough Trader Pizza and Nonna's Kitchen, the latter at 544 North Main, hold two more. Once a building like the Lown Mercantile gets restored and leased, it is off the market for the next operator who wants that same combination of sandstone walls and Main Street foot traffic.

That is not a complaint about scarcity. It is a fairly direct way to understand why the same handful of names keep showing up whenever a new concept lands downtown: Badlands Hospitality Management on one corner, the Sled Haus family two blocks over. There are only so many buildings left that can hold this kind of investment, and the ones that already have working plumbing, parking access, and a restored facade get claimed fast.

Main Street Closes This Week

Here's the timing that makes this month specifically worth paying attention to if you live nearby. Starting Monday, September 28, 2026, the City of Spearfish is closing Main Street from Jackson Boulevard through the Grant Street intersection for a mill-and-overlay paving project, with Johner & Sons Inc. of Spearfish handling the work. The city expects the closure to last up to five days depending on weather. No parking will be allowed on Main Street during that stretch, and pedestrian crossings will be restricted, though sidewalks stay open the entire time.

That closure runs along the same street as Nonna's Kitchen at 544 North Main, and it lands during the same stretch of fall when Spearfish Canyon traffic typically peaks, with the byway's color reports already tracking near the halfway point toward full foliage as of mid-September. Six Goats and Berlin sit a block or two off Main itself, on 5th Street and Jackson Boulevard respectively, so neither one loses direct access. But anyone planning to walk Main Street for dinner this week should expect to park a block over and cross on foot rather than pull up in front.

None of this is new territory for this particular stretch of road. A building that spent thirty years with its original face covered by retail siding and came back has already proven it can absorb worse than a five-day repaving job. The construction crews will be gone well before the aspens finish turning, and the six goats, real ones, are still up in the hills above Black Elk Peak doing what their ancestors did a century ago. The tavern named for them just gives you a reason to think about that story while you're waiting for a table.

If you're the kind of person who notices which buildings on Main Street are getting a second life and which ones are still waiting, that instinct tends to be useful well beyond deciding where to eat. Black Hills Real Estate Pros spends a lot of time watching this same block for reasons that go a little further than dinner reservations. If you want to talk through what a building like that says about a neighborhood, reach out and we'll walk through it together.