Lead (/ˈliːd/ LEED)[7] is a city in Lawrence County, South Dakota, United States.

[8] Lead is located in western South Dakota, in the Black Hills near the Wyoming state line.

Phoebe Hearst and Thomas Grier, the Homestake Mine superintendent, worked together to create the Homestake Opera House and Recreation Center for the benefit of miner workers and their families.

Phoebe Hearst donated regularly to Lead's churches, and provided college scholarships from Lead–Deadwood school which holds a staff of over 130 to the children of mine and mill workers.

[11] In the early 1930s, due to fear of cave-ins of the miles of tunnels under Lead's Homestake Mine, many of the town's buildings located in the bottom of a canyon were moved further uphill to safer locations.

[12] Lead and the Homestake Mine are the site of the Sanford Underground Research Facility, or Sanford Lab, a NSF facility for low-background experiments on neutrinos, dark matter, and other nuclear physics topics, as well as biology and mine engineering studies.

Over four hundred buildings and 580 acres (230 ha) were included in the historic district, which has boundaries roughly equivalent to the city limits.

[6] According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 2.06 square miles (5.34 km2), all land.

[14] Two prominent manmade features of Lead's geography are the giant open cut, which was used for surface gold mining by the Homestake Mine,[15] and the resulting ridge nearby built with the non-producing material from the cut.

[citation needed] Lead has a humid continental climate (Köppen Dfb) with warm summers and cold, very snowy winters with the typical extremely variable temperatures of the western Great Plains.

Its high elevation in the Black Hills makes Lead one of the wettest places in South Dakota and among the snowiest places in the contiguous United States with a mean snowfall of 183.9 inches or 4.67 metres.

[16] Precipitation is lower in summer than in spring, and declines further into the fall and winter as temperatures cool.

In the summer, there are numerous trails for hiking, mountain biking, and horse back riding.