Monthly Archives: October 2013

Discovering the “Montinental Divide”: Circle

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Circle, the county seat of McCone County and an important crossroads in eastern Montana, is another of the towns along the “Montinental Divide.”  It is also one of my favorite places in the region.  I first encountered the dusty streets of Circle 29 years ago, when I spent a night at the Gladstone Hotel.  This two-story frame building, built in the 1910s to serve businessmen and new residents who were flocking to the region by hundreds, even thousands during the decade’s homesteading boom, was a rarity in 1984. Many Eastern 

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Montana towns had long ago lost their homesteading boom-era hotels or boarding houses.  Circle still had theirs, and one that literally creaked of history as you walked its hallways.  Clearly the Gladstone, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is now closed–and awaiting a new future.  Perhaps the expanding oil boom will convince someone to revitalize the property, which occupies one of the town’s four central corners, and give it new life.

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Another reason I liked Circle was its museum, and especially its director back in 1984 the rather legendary Orville Quick.  Orville had a passion for his community and its history that I

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had never encountered before, and have rarely encountered since.  The museum combined

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a rather eclectic collection of local items, memorializing the homesteading era, with the region’s preference for building museums, starting with the town’s former Northern Pacific Railroad passenger station.

The museum has expanded significantly since my last visit in 1988.  Recognizing that Circle is an important crossroads for heritage tourists traveling the region’s backroads, it has multiple interpretive kiosks identifying important places and key themes.

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And to one side of the museum and behind the kiosks is a set of sculptures interpreting the deep, deep past when dinosaurs roamed this land.

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Of course there is much more to Circle than an aging hotel and a fascinating local museum. The McCone County Courthouse (1949), designed by the architectural firm J. G. Link of Billings, is a late New Deal Moderne styled building, seemingly more at home, architecturally, in the 1930s than with the Cold War era.

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Across the street is the town’s Carnegie Library, still a vital community institution.  Good watering holes abound–across from the Gladstone Hotel is my favorite from 1984, the Corner Bar.

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The McCone County Fairgrounds hosts one of the region’s best rodeos every summer and then out at the airport is yet another rare historic property–the military’s 1940s radar and radio substations that once could be found at small airports throughout the state, helping to guide planes to the more important base at Cut Bank.  Kate Hampton of the Montana State Historic Preservation Office asked me in 2012 to keep my eyes out for these resources and, while it is more difficult just to drive into airport property today than in the past, the Circle location seems to be another of these properties that help to tell the state’s World War II story.

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Mr. Hagermann’s “montinental divide” is a fascinating concept, and if it leads you to Circle–have fun.  Great town:  here you see only some of the highlights.

Looking at the “Montinental Divide”: Ingomar

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Ingomar was another town identified in last week’s Great Falls Tribune article about the “monumental divide”–the vast landscape in central and eastern Montana defined by the drainages of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.  Ingomar, in Rosebud County, is a Milwaukee Road town located along U.S. Highway 12.  If you know nothing about Montana, that sounds like a fairly central location, and that the town, by extension, must have some size to it.  

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The opposite is true.  Ingomar is a tiny place, with a handful of residents, but one of the most famous places in eastern Montana due solely to the Jersey Lilly Bar–one of the state’s iconic community centers and watering holes.

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The Jersey Lilly is the town’s former bank, built in the first decades of the 20th century when hopes for this place as a rising town along the Milwaukee Road were at their highest.

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But the homesteading bust of the 1920s was especially cruel in this northern part of Rosebud County.  The well-designed brick bank found a second life as a bar, serving locals primarily but also those adventuresome travelers who used US 12 to crisscross the region. I first came here 30 years ago–the ramshackle wood awning and posts existed then, giving the place a Wild West look that seemed out of place then but now with age seems perfectly legit.

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Thirty years ago, the local school still served students; it survives but now as a “Bunk n Biscuit” and proclaims itself as the only place to sleep within a 100 miles.

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Ingomar has other historic buildings that remind you of past prominence, including a faded sign on a general merchandise and equipment store and especially the town’s extant Milwaukee Road depot, now a private residence.

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Indeed, the residents use an old train car of the Milwaukee Road to identify its roots in the railroad age–good thing since the tracks long disappeared here after the Milwaukee went bankrupt over 30 years ago.

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Despite its isolation, and the bust of the railroad, Ingomar has lasted better than many towns of the homesteading era.  Give thanks to local residents who won’t let the town wither away and especially to the Jersey Lilly, one of the state’s most rural National Register properties but certainly one of the places you want to visit along the “montinental divide.”

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Looking at the “Montinental Divide”: Broadview, Montana

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I hope you saw a great story in this week’s Great Falls Tribune about the “montimental divide.”  It is a phrase coined by Doug Habermann of Montana State Parks, to discuss the landscape of eastern Montana created by the divide between the drainages of the Missouri and Yellowstone river.  Don’t want to steal the Tribune’s and Habermann’s thunder, so I encourage you to look up the article.  I am going to riff on some of the places Habermann outlines along the divide–especially the small towns and rural landscapes.  I fully agree–and many of you know I have said so for many years–that eastern Montana has many special places and compelling landscapes.  That is why I so enjoyed the article–Habermann and the Tribune highlighted places that often get forgotten when folks speak of the Big Sky Country.

Let’s start with one of the towns that many Montanans speed by–at least those in Billings heading north to central Montana via Montana Highway 3.  Broadview was one of the railroad towns created in northern Yellowstone County once the Great Northern Railway took control of the state’s railroad lines at the turn of the last century.  This image of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe train heading to Billings just south of Broadview.

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In the fall of 1990 James J. Hill of the Great Northern announced plans to build the Great Falls and Billings Railway that would connect the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific Railroad and then connect both lines to the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy in Billings.   Finally the city would have that northern rail connection businessmen had wanted since 1882-1883.  The Billings Gazette proclaimed that the new line “would soon make Billings the trade center of eastern and central Montana.” That prophecy became true–for reasons more than just the railroad line.  Broadview is now the largest of those rail towns created north of Billings in Yellowstone County.  

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The town’s extant, and nicely preserved, Great Northern standardized design passenger depot is a reminder of the railroad’s impact on the region.  When you pull back from the depot and take in an overview of the townscape, you see the typical traits of the region’s built environment, from the grain elevators to the small scale of the other buildings to the general symmetry of the town layout.

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The still thriving local school, home to the Pirates, speaks to the continued vitality of the community, despite its relative proximity to Billings.  Broadwater is on the edge–of Yellowstone County and of the “montinental divide.”

Modernism in a Montana Ghost Town: St. Timothy’s at Southern Cross

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Southern Cross is a Montana ghost town located in the mountains overlooking Georgetown Lake.  Established c. 1880 and active until World War II, the town retains several historic structures, from a historic boarding house to individual residences to ramshackle mining buildings.

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But there is also one of the most interesting examples of Montana 1960s modernism on the edge of the town:  St. Timothy Memorial Chapel.  This contemporary styled mix of native stone, timber, and geometric angles dates to 1965. It was built as a community church, in memory of Timothy Dillon Bowman by his parents John W. and Crete Dillon Bowman.

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Timothy Bowman had died in 1956, and his parents picked out a beautiful view of Georgetown Lake for the chapel site.

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The building has changed very little since its construction almost 50 years ago and the county has few churches, really buildings of any sort, that compare with its modern Rustic styling.

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