Baker: The Milwaukee Road’s Eastern Gateway to Montana

Posted on November 5, 2015 by carrollvanwest

The Milwaukee Road, the last transcontinental railroad to crisscross Montana, enters eastern Montana at the town of Baker, established in 1908, which served as an important rail center for the company with the full name of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific. When I visited Baker in 1984 i noted that many of its buildings dated from the homesteading era although there was a clear second layer of development died to the region’s oil boom of the late 1960s and 1970s. In A Traveler’s Companion to Montana History (1986) I noted “Baker’s railroad corridor is still largely intact, and the spatial arrangement created by its Milwaukee depot and the neighboring Baker Hotel, an imposing brick building dating to 1916, symbolizes the railroad’s importance to the town.” Both buildings are gone now unfortunately but an indication of the prominence of the corridor is still conveyed by the brick building below which has served the community in many commercial and professional ways over the decades.

Insurance was just one of the services provided by this neoclassical styled building.

Today the hotel, the tracks, and the huge grain elevators along the railroad corridor remain, and the elevators still visually dominate the surrounding mostly one-or two-story built environment. But the depot is gone, leaving a hole in the town’s historic fabric.

Buildings and railroad tracks were not the only legacy of the Milwaukee in Baker–there was the large lake the company developed to provide water for its trains in a largely parched region. The Baker Lake, 30 years ago, was undergoing another improvement project, part of the town’s generation-long effort to turn a forgotten corporate remnant into a community asset. The company built the lake c. 1908 but soon found that the water was too salty–it corroded the equipment. And so the lake sat, until the 1950s when the Baker’s Woman Club began an effort to convince the railroad to transfer the lake to local

government. County leaders became convinced that yes, Baker needed a community recreation asset, and eventually the land was transferred into the public use, and Baker Lake by the end of the century was an unique asset in southeastern Montana, and a center for recreation and special events.

The lake is not the only contribution of the Woman’s Club. it also was central in creating, staffing, and maintaining a public library, and the contemporary-designed library from 1970 remains but also has been enlarged since 1984.

The Fallon County-City of Baker Administration Building, 1974-1975

Indeed, I noted the recent construction of the 1970s in Baker, like the new county courthouse/city administration building where I held a public meeting, but I didn’t really process the layer of modernism in the town, a reflection of its growth from 1950 to 1970, when the population grew from 1,772 to 2,584. The new joint administration building, designed by the Billings firm of Johnson Graham Associates, remains an impressive piece of contemporary design. Architects Willard Johnson and Orval Graham had established the firm in 1967. The Baker project established a connection between the firm and county that continued into the present: the new grandstand at the Fallon County Fairgrounds is also a JGA design, from 2011.

The tradition of county fairs dates to 1909 and today the Fallon County Fair is one of the region’s largest.

Historic schools are other important contributions to the town’s built environment. Above is the Washington School, built in 1927. It is a brick Classical Revival statement of the town’s insistence for permanence in the face of the homesteading bust. When I last visited in 2013, the school was undergoing rehabilitation to become an office building. On the other side of town stood a more modern design, the Longfellow School, built in 1968 during the height of the population boom in Baker. Its low, rectangular mass was modern school design at its best, although since my 1984 visit the casement windows have been covered so central heat and air could be installed.

The second building in Baker listed in the National Register was the only one designated in 1984, and it was the pride and joy of the community: the old county courthouse converted into the O’Fallon Museum. Here was not only the historical exhibits typical of the area but also installations about the region’s prehistoric past and moved buildings to host special

collections but also to interpret the homesteading past. I will always remember my public meeting in Baker, for the obvious pride residents had in the museum but also for the comment that they could not wait to show me “our really old stuff,” such as a 1916 homestead. Coming from my training at Colonial Williamsburg, considering places from 1916 as really old was a notion that took some getting used to, but of course in the context of settlement and development of southeastern Montana, it made perfect sense.

Today I would even join into the call for the “really old stuff”–like the Lake Theatre of 1918. It certainly deserves a place in the National Register as so few classic movie theaters remain in this part of the state. The same could be said for this classic c. 1960 drive-in,

which is part of the town’s roadside architecture traditions along U.S. Highway 12, the federal road that parallels so much of the Milwaukee Road’s route through Montana. For

good measure I would even dare say that it’s time to assess the significance of the oil wells and facilities along Montana Highway 7 as you enter or leave Baker. The discovery of oil and its development in the 1960s and 1970s certainly was the major economic story of the town and county in the second half of the 20th century.

In 2015 Baker has retreated from that c. 1960-1970 boom. Population peaked at 2584 in 1970. It remained just a hundred or so under that in 1980, but changes in demand, technology and the bankruptcy of the Milwaukee meant that Baker in the last 30 years has lost residents, in 2010 down to 1741, about the same number as in 1950. Yet I like that the lake had been restored, and it remained a vibrant part of the town, that new banks and new renovations were part of the town, and indeed, that an old car dealership and garage was now the very good Three Garages Bar. Historic preservation can play a larger role in Baker’s future just as it did during Baker’s boom in the past.

Shifting Meanings in the Big Horn Landscape

Posted on November 2, 2015 by carrollvanwest

When I first arrived in Montana in 1981 the first place that I stopped at was Little Bighorn Battlefield, then known as Custer Battlefield National Monument. As a southerner new to the west, here was a place that “everyone” knew about, an iconic western battlefield where Gen. George A. Custer and the 7th Calvary suffered a devastating defeat from a combined Sioux-Cheyenne force. Everything then was focused on “Last Stand Hill” where

Little Big Horn Battlefield, 1984

Custer and his troops had stood for almost 100 years. As a veteran visitor to southern Civil War battlefields, it struck me how what you saw and experienced was all about the federal side–similar to what you found back then at southern Civil War memorial parks, where valiant Confederates fought what seemed to be a foe with no name outside of enemy.

This quotation from Theodore O’Hara’s “Bivouac of the Dead” is found in many Civil War era national cemeteries.

Over the decades I have returned to the battlefield numerous times, even once (by accident I hadn’t even thought that the day would be an anniversary) when re-enactors posed by the famous obelisk monument, creating a very odd juxtaposition between past and present. (I don’t think Custer and his men were smiling on that hill in 1876).

By this time, meaning at the battlefield had shifted to a larger, more inclusive narrative, beginning with the actual name of the park, now Little Bighorn Battlefield. Public interpretation, fueled not only by the changing times but an intensive archaeological investigation of the park in the late 1980s, suddenly located Native Americans within the battle landscape. There was a growing feeling that yes this was a battle between enemies, but enemies with names, motivations, and their own sense of what it all meant.

Last Chance Hill was still a focal point in 2015 but now its narrative of unity and sacrifice was countered by a new monument, built to consider the story of Little Bighorn from the perspective of the Native American warriors who fought here.

The monument compels reflection—the metal profiles of Native American warriors blend into the actual battlefield landscape as if ghosts of warriors past were again upon the field. Text and images add additional layers of interpretation and meaning to the battlefield, from a decided Native American perspective.

Then new tombstones, in a brownish stone, distinguished fallen Cheyenne warriors from the marble tombstones for soldiers from the 7th Calvary. The place has been ennobled, transformed as a both a park and a place of reflection on what the Indian Wars of the 1870s have meant to the nation and to the peoples who fought in them.

Nearby within Crow Agency is a further addition to the public interpretation of the region’s military history: the exemplary Apsaalooke Veterans Park, an installation that celebrates veterans past and present. At the I-90 exit for U.S. 212 at Crow Agency, a new landscape has emerged through spaces such as the park, the new Apsaalooke casino, and especially the modernist styled medical center, located near the fairgrounds for the annual Crow fair.

The sparking bright lights of casino sign stand in stark contrast to the old mission church, now The Father’s House place of worship.

In the middle of the Crow Indian Reservation is another landscape of change, one not so visited by tourists. St. Xavier was an important Catholic mission among the Crow Indians, established along the Big Horn River in 1887-1888 by Father Peter Prando. The understated Gothic-styled church was a building documented in my A Traveler’s Companion to Montana History book in 1986 and the survey included both the church and small gable-front residence built for the priests.

Those same buildings remain today, as does the nearby Pretty Eagle Catholic Academy, representing community continuity and the Catholic commitment to the reservation. But

the mid-20th century St. Xavier town site has not weathered the decades so well. Businesses have largely disappeared and the Art Deco-styled St. Xavier public school, a Public Works Administration project from the New Deal designed by Billings architect J.G. Link in 1938 is now abandoned and decaying.

Across the road from the school is St. John’s Lutheran Church, a weather- and time-worn, a 20th century log building speaking more to the past than the present. And running

nearby is one of many irrigation ditches that promised the transformation of the Big Horn Valley for 20th century homesteaders but as the forgotten ranches surrounding St. Xavier remind us, the irrigated empire of eastern Montana did not bring riches to everyone.

Transformations and shifting meanings of the past from the perspective of the present make the Big Horn a fascinating place to explore.

Two Forts on the Bighorn

Posted on October 30, 2015 by carrollvanwest

The Big Horn River is among Montana’s most famous as it winds its way out of the high mountains and empties into the Yellowstone River near the village of Custer. In the southern end of Big Horn County are two forts, one barely noticeable today while the other speaks to the radically different history of the Big Horn over the last 50-plus years.

The oldest is Fort C. F. Smith, established by the U.S. Army in 1866-1868 as part of its system of defensive installations to protect travelers along the Bozeman Trail. Named for Civil War general Charles Ferguson Smith, the post stood near the trail, as seen above, and also near a major Big Horn ferry, a location deemed almost 100 years later as perfect for a major federal dam and reservoir project. A peace treaty between the federal government and Sioux and Cheyenne Indians who had opposed the trail and the forts led to the abode constructed fort’s abandonment in 1868. Today, the site is marked–the Big Horn County chapter of the Federation of Montana Woman’s Clubs did so in 1933–but on private property. It has become a forgotten place within the state’s historic landscape.

Photograph courtesy of the National Park Service and its website on the Big Horn Canyon National Recreation Area.

The second Fort Smith is the name given to the government-planned town developed by the Bureau of Reclamation as part of its Yellowtail Dam project of the early 1960s. The project was part of the massive federal reordering of the plains landscape through the Pick-Sloan Missouri River Basin Program, an attempt to coordinate efforts between the Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers. The Yellowtail Dam project received Congressional funding in 1961. The contractors included Morrison-Knudsen Company from Boise; Kaiser Company from Oakland, CA; Perini Corporation from Massachusetts, the Walsh Construction Company of Iowa, and the S Contracting Company from Butte. The contractors received almost $40 million for the project.

Built from 1961 to 1966, Yellowtail Dam, named for Crow Indian Robert Yellowtail and standing at 525 feet in height, instantly dominated the surrounding landscape and turned the Big Horn Canyon into a huge lake some 72 miles along, that is managed as the Big Horn Canyon National Recreation Area.

Access to the dam and its power plant was significantly curtailed after 9/11/2001.

The dam was part of an entirely new engineered landscape that defined this part of Big Horn Canyon and the Crow Indian reservation, with new ditches, the spillway, and a planned town for government employees.

The town of Fort Smith was an obvious nod to the earlier army installation. But this was not a rectangle of adobe quarters; it was a typical 1960s suburban development dropped into the middle of the Crow Reservation. The streets are wide and circular, a concession to suburban models of planning but also taking advantage of the surrounding landscape.

In keeping with other suburbs of the early 1960s, the houses mixed “contemporary” styles such as split-levels and the long, horizontal Ranch house. There were set-aside open

spaces for recreation and parks as well as a separate commercial area.

At the heart of the community was not a agency headquarters but a modernist styled public school–recognizing that children and their needs would help to define community among the different federal officials.

The second Fort Smith is a fascinating landscape documenting the federal impact on the Big Horn River in the middle decades of the 20th century–a basic reordering of nature that created new impetus for recreation in the county and impacted the county seat of Hardin with its own new wave of modernist styling. A suburb in the middle of nowhere–Fort Smith is among the state’s most distinctive places.

A last look at Carbon County, and a visit into the Crow Nation

Posted on October 22, 2015 by carrollvanwest

In the northern reaches of Carbon County are two additional towns on U.S. 212 I would like to review before I turn into a far different landscape in neighboring Big Horn County. I looked earlier at the Boyd store, and its changes over 30 years, briefly in passing on to other railroad towns in the Clark’s Fork Valley.

But Boyd is worth a second look if for nothing more than its rambling vernacular design post office since so many of those buildings have been replaced in the last 30 years by standardized USPS designs. The same can be said of the Boyd School, a frame building now encased in vinyl that has layers of history in it as the community made additions as necessary over the decades.Continuing north on U.S. Highway 212 is the much larger, prosperous town of Joliet. Joliet is an anomaly–its population now is larger than it has ever been since census data has been recorded. So many eastern Montana towns steadily lost population to where they are mere skeletons of themselves today. Joliet has avoided that fate; in fact its population in 2010 was slightly more than when I first visited in 1984.

The Joliet Community Center symbolizes the town’s stability and sense of itself.

The Rock Creek State Bank, now the Rebakah Lodge Building, anchors one of the town’s most prominent commercial corners. It is one of several buildings in Joliet listed in the National Register of Historic Places, including a large historic residential district, in the last 30 years. Joliet had nothing designated in the National Register when I visited in 1984.

While there is a bright new sheen to a good bit of Joliet, the downtown still has that classic mix of vernacular frame and brick one-story commercial buildings typical of the turn of the century railroad/homestead boom towns. And like most, a tavern, in this case the Frontier Bar, is a permanent fixture in the town.

Outside of town is a wonderful array of roadside public sculpture, courtesy of long-time Joliet resident Charles Ringer. Ringer moved to town, purchasing an old junk yard and part of a WPA granary, in 1971. His works have become landmarks for travelers along U.S. Highway 212. Ringer runs a studio shop out of an old ranch-style house.

Known to many winter travelers as “The Snow God” but named “The Creature” by its creator Charles Ringer, this huge metal sculpture is roadside art at its best in Montana.

Ringer is also known for his various kinetic sculptures, and the entire property becomes a way for travelers to interact with, or just enjoy, the general wackiness of his creations.

From Joliet you can strike out east on an improved gravel road, passing through the town of Edgar, and then climbing up out of the Clark’s Fork Valley and into the land of the Apsaalooke, or the Crow Indian Tribe. Traveling west in the Crow reservation, you encounter two instant landmarks, one much more recent than the other but both are tightly intertwined. A compelling metal sculpture of a warrior announces the entrance to the Plenty Coups High School, shrouded on the morning I went there in 2015 by an early morning fog.

Across the road is the Plenty Coups State Park, a fascinating memorial to the former Crow chief Plenty Coups, who the Crow Indian Tribe has designated as its last traditional tribal

chief. Plenty Coups had been among the first Crow Indians to take up a homestead, 320 acres along Pryor Creek, in 1884. His succession of dwellings, using locally available

materials to build a log house, help to tell his story as well as how some Crows became ranchers. The park has erected a modern tipi to show earlier Crow dwelling types; the rambling nature of the log house, is both typical and spectacular. Typical in that

it is a three-bay house with a centered front door, but actually quite spectacular in its interior feel of open space, and that its very size would have spoken to the family’s prominence and achievements. The park also interprets a traditional sweat lodge, adding to the understanding of tradition and new ways that blended to create the homestead.

When Plenty Coups died in 1932 he was 84. He and his wife Strikes the Iron left 195 acres of their property to be a public park. Later the National Park Service designated the site as a National Historic Landmark. Since my first visit in 1982 a new museum building had been added to the park, significantly enhancing the public interpretation of the site; you left with the feeling that this was just not a static installation and memorial (as it was in the 1980s) but a true museum and park which will continue to grow and adapt to the needs of the Crown Indian Tribe and the park’s visitors.

To the east of Pryor, on Pryor Creek Road, was another historical place associated with the Apsaalooke–the Pryor Creek Battlefield. Where in the low creek bluffs and the narrow

valley created by the water, a major battle between the Apsaalooke and their enemies the Lakota, Cheyenne, and Arapaho took place c. 1861–just at the time the Civil War was beginning in the United States far to the east.

The Crows had worked with federal officials to build a road turn-off and place interpretive markers about this key battle for the control of the Yellowstone Country c. 1861, just before the time that the first permanent white settlers entered what would become Montana Territory. Thirty years ago, I knew from Crow historian Joe Medicine Crow that this famous battle, where the Apsaalooke secured control of the region in what Medicine Crow called a “glorious victory,” took place along Pryor Creek Road. But the markers now pinpoint the battlefield and interpret what happened plus the significance of the fight.

Here was suddenly a place that I had truly never “seen” before–and an indication of how good interpretive markers can make a desolate place come alive with historical meaning. Kudos to all for bringing forth this forgotten battlefield and a site of a famous Crow victory.

Bridger: Northern Pacific Railroad Hub in the Clark’s Fork Valley

Posted on October 11, 2015 by carrollvanwest

As you head north into Montana from Wyoming on U. S. 310, the first substantial place you encounter is Bridger, named for famed fur trader and early Yellowstone traveler Jim Bridger. Like its neighbor to the north in Fromberg, Bridger is another turn of the 20th century Northern Pacific Railroad town in the Clark’s Fork River Valley that was much the same from my initial visit 31 years ago. Its population had remained steady–a tad over 700, about the same as in 1984, and only 150 or so less than its height in 1950.

The town’s grain elevators speak to the formative impact of the railroad. Here back in the late 1890s engineers followed a well worn and recognized Indian trail–a similar route to what Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce Indians chose a generation earlier as he tried to find safety for his people, traveling from Wyoming into the Clark’s Fork Valley.

The town’s commercial district retains much of its early 20th century look. Old bank buildings dominate the town center, while substantial 2-story commercial buildings (including properties listed in the National Register) remain, showing how quickly merchants came to Bridger and launched businesses to attract the growing number of homesteaders in the Clark’s Fork River valley in the 1910s.

That first generation of settlers did their part to build lasting community institutions. The Bridger United Methodist Church is an impressive example of vernacular Gothic design. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The town library is almost a picture perfect example of what this institution should look like in a small town setting.

The irrigation ditch drifting through the town park is a reminder of how the engineered landscape of irrigated fields provided much of Bridger’s early wealth and development. The park itself was a creation of the Works Progress Administration in the late 1930s.

Within the park is a ceramic and brick arch, one of the town’s many examples of public art. The mural on a side of a store seen earlier in this post is another example while creative metal statues of wild horses grazing or the imposing figure of Jim Bridger himself welcoming visitors at the southern end of the town underscores a local tradition of public art not often seen in Montana’s small towns.

Other historic statements of the town’s sense of community include the 1930s Civic Center, a bit worn today but a center for community gatherings and social events for decades.

Bridger’s schools from the 1960s introduce Montana modernism to the townscape, almost like spaceships landing within the middle of the Clark’s Fork River Valley. Modernism 1960s style also characterize Sacred Heart Catholic Church, St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, and the Bridger Seventh Day Adventist Church, constructed in 1965.

St. Paul Lutheran Church Sacred Heart Catholic Church

These community anchors date from 50 years ago, so obviously growth has been stagnant, or stable, pick your terms, since the boom introduced in the valley through expanded irrigation projects in the post-World War II era. But all of the buildings are well maintained, and are part of the sense of overall sense of pride you get from a visit to Bridger.

Bridger has reminders, both in monuments and in businesses, of the deep past of the Clark’s Fork River Valley. It is an interesting place of strong institutions, several National Register-listed historic homes, and local business, and a significant part of the often ignored history of the Clark’s Fork Valley.

Railroad Towns of the Clark’s Fork Valley

Posted on October 10, 2015 by carrollvanwest

The name Carbon County seemingly says it all–here is a Montana place that is mining country, and coal mining at all. As earlier posts have discussed, coal mining is vitally important to the county’s history. The county seat of Red Lodge was a major coal mining town. But even Red Lodge’s historic built environment speaks of another side of Carbon County’s history. Its tall shiny grain elevator along the railroad tracks remind us that Carbon County was also agricultural country, especially in the Clark’s Fork River Valley.

The next couple of posts will explore this part of Carbon County–the towns and places many tourists roar by as they seek out Red Lodge and the mountains beyond. Some places were, and are, tiny but still changes over 30 years are apparent. Boyd, for instance. In 1984 I caught this iconic view of past and present at the historic Boyd store. The building is still there but the facade is changed, to a rustic western style, one more to the liking of fast-moving tourists.

Edgar is a place that admittedly I gave little attention to in 1984. That was a mistake. I missed a very interesting modernist-styled school, probably part of the county-wide WPA projects for schools in the late 1930s, along with another 1960s styled addition. The school closed in 2009.

Edgar still has its bar, located in a fine one-story brick building–but not much else from the decades when it mattered in the 20th century.

Fromberg is a different story. Unlike so many country railroad towns in Montana, Fromberg has a strong sense of itself, both in the present and in the past. Part of that has to be a reflection of its comparative stability. Its population height came in 1940, with mover 500 residents. Today the population remains over 400, just about a 100 person decrease over 70 years. For Montana rural towns that is exceptional. Indeed, from my first visit in 1984 to my last in 2015, the town had only lost a few families.

Fromberg has its own museum; the centerpiece of which is its restored railroad depot, part of the old Northern Pacific spur line. In true northern plains fashion, other historic buildings have been moved onto the museum grounds. It’s not quite a building zoo but the buildings give the place enough presence to attract visitors speeding along the highway.

Fromberg is a t-plan town, and all of the patterns of that type of town planning are apparent. From the depot, running west, is the primary commercial street, with brick and fame buildings on either side.

The historic Odd Fellows hall dominates the commercial district–its conversion into the town’s post office, rather than a historic building being lost so a modern standardized design post office could be put in its place, is an excellent example of historic preservation done right. Indeed, Fromberg residents have embraced the possibilities of preservation and multiple buildings are listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

The mural about overland travel on the front of the Clark’s Fork Bank adds a touch of public interpretation. If you want first-person stories, a stop at the Little Cowboy Bar (and “museum”, located at where the commercial district intersects with the highway, will be worth it. It is one of the region’s classic watering holes.

Fromberg also has documented its historic domestic architecture, raining from vernacular styled early 20th century homes to more stylish bungalows and even a couple of good examples of Dutch Colonial Revival style.

The homes are clustered around two historic churches, the brick St. Joseph Catholic church and the frame Gothic-styled and National Register-listed Methodist Church, built in 1907-1908 by contractor Charles Darnell and the community.

The historic Fromberg school, like its counterpart in Edgar, was part of the countywide program of building modern schools by the WPA during the New Deal. Its still impressive facade conveys well the WPA’s sense of modernism, and it remains the town’s primary community center today.

Carbon County’s Bearcreek and the Smith Mine Disaster

Posted on September 30, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Red Lodge prospered as a railroad/coal town because rich seams of coal existed all around it, especially to the east along Bear Creek, now followed by Montana 308. Active exploitation of these resources started at the beginning of the 20th century, and continued, on a significantly reduced scale, into the 1970s.

Bearcreek, the town that served these mines, was not much a place when I first visited in 1984, with the mines having been closed for a decade, many had left. It had that abandoned look of other Montana mining towns where mining had ceased. Over 300 people lived there during World War II; in the 1980s about 60 residents could be counted.

Today, population has slightly ticked up–to almost 80 residents–but little remains of historic Bearcreek and its boom from 1905-c.1925, except for buildings made with stone from nearby sandstone quarries or flashier commercial buildings with pressed tin exteriors.

Bearcreek is a sliver of what it had been due to the growth of the Colstrip mines and the railroad shift from coal to diesel power from 1925 to 1950. But its fate, so closely intertwined with the mines, took a terrible turn for the worst in early 1943 when methane gas combined with lax safety procedures to led to the explosion of the Smith Mine. With 74 miners dead, along with one first responder who died from injuries attempting to save the miners, the Smith Mine explosion is counted as Montana’s most deadly coal mining disaster. (Ironically due to the demand for coal during World War II, the mine stayed in production, in spite of the disaster, until the end of the war).

When I visited in 1984 the mine site was abandoned, deteriorating, but it did have public interpretation in the shape of a wooden highway historical marker, and the hulk of buildings did suggest a solemn memorial to those who had lost their lives.

Since that time, the deterioration of the site has continued, as it is open to the elements. But the Montana State Historic Preservation Office has worked with property owners to create the Smith Mine Historic District in the National Register of Historic Places. Plus, the preservation office and Montana Department of Transportation have added their own public interpretation markers to the highway historical marker, and these attract tourists on a regular basis to think about and remember those who died to fuel the nation’s war machine during World War II.

Frankly I think that is a good place for the Smith Mine site to be: a decaying yet compelling industrial memorial to coal, miners, and the constant need for mine safety.

Red Lodge: Preservation Maybes and Maybe Nots

Posted on September 22, 2015 by carrollvanwest

It’s no secret that I have long admired the towns of the Yellowstone Valley. Thirty plus years ago, the attitude across much of Montana was dismissive of this region: I even was told by someone who should have known better that “outside of Custer, there’s really isn’t much history there.” Not only was their history in spades–chronologically deep, thematically rich–there was this tremendous built environment that I began to explore in 1982, and haven’t stopped since.

Admittedly I take an old school approach to the preservation of this landscape. Red Lodge has many exemplary preservation achievements but in the 21st century success may be leading to the community losing that edge, admittedly rough edge, that once characterized this region of Montana. Case in point: the Snag Bar. The image on the left is from the 1980s–on the right is an image from this summer. I was happy that the Snag was still with us–always a cozy watering hole in the past. But now its entrance spoke to a different audience, and the place had taken on the “Main Street Preservation” look that you can find across the country–and a bit of distinctiveness was gone.

Red Lodge was not tipped into that preservation fantasy land right out of Disney’s “Main Street U.S.A.” But new infill of modern false-fronts and even a heavy mountain-like Rustic feel doesn’t help, not to mention the northern California wine bar with its set-backs and sidewalk seating. It is just worrisome. As is the future of this once grand movie theater,

which has been hanging on, seemingly by a thread, for decades. The theater has one of the great Classical Revival facades found in the state, full of whimsy and wonderful detail.

Its conversion into a garage was kept it alive but a conversion into a new public use: well it is a huge building, that needs work, and Red Lodge is already blessed with a brilliant historic movie theater, the Roman. Multiple theaters in the early 20th century made sense: today not so much.

Red Lodge also has gotten it right in its residential historic districts. The “Hi-Bug” neighborhood–a designation 100 years ago that spoke to the merchant class that lived in the town’s most affluent neighborhood–has made a remarkable recovery in the last 30 years, and looks great as these few images attest.

Throughout town there are similar preservation success stories, ranging from a historic service station (that has a nifty exhibit about Yellowstone tour buses and their preservation lurking inside) and one of my new favorites, the Regis Grocery, now a neighborhood (meaning off the tourists’ beaten path of US 212) cafe worth a stop.

Red Lodge does have challenges–growth that can overwhelm historic character, too many tourism focused businesses–but the changes here over 30 years are impressive achievements, sure signs of how the 1966 National Historic Preservation Act has helped to change the face of Montana.

Red Lodge’s Commercial District: Turn of the 20th Century Masonry in the Yellowstone Valley

Posted on September 21, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Red Lodge’s commercial district is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. While the construction dates in the district span over 100 years, from the 1890s to more recent modern-era “in fill” buildings, the most notable pattern is the number of two-story stone or brick commercial buildings from the turn of the 20th century.

The landmark Pollard Hotel is a good example. Opened in 1893 as the Spofford Hotel, the building was an instant business landmark, a hotel located halfway between the depot and the heart of the new city. As the boom intensified at the turn of the century, Thomas Pollard bought the place and doubled its size in 1902. The Pollard served as that “booster” hotel, designed to show businessmen and investors that Red Lodge was an up and coming place.

The Pollard was not alone in defining the city’s look. Facing it were long blocks of two-part mostly brick commercial buildings, with retail and sales on the first floor and residences and offices for a growing professional class on the 2nd floors.

The decorative cornices proudly proclaimed that the new buildings were part of the new century, and a promising era for all involved. Of course commercial design in more settled areas to the east and west had already moved away from the heavy masonry typical of the 1880s–but Red Lodge was largely a Victorian commercial district for what would be a 20th century mining boom town.

While two-story, two-part commercial blocks set one pattern in historic Red Lodge, another is created through the rhythm of the large commercial enterprises and the less ambitious one-story brick buildings of the district.

Here is another building material found in abundance, rusticated concrete block meant to mimic stone masonry, and the stuccoed top half of the bakery building is another reminder that some owners used imitation materials to fit into Red Lodge’s streetscapes.

While the commercial district retains much of what made it a special place when I first visited over 30 years ago, it has lost some of that small town Montana feel as owners increasingly cater to those tourists passing through. The challenges of preservation in Red Lodge will be the next topic.

Red Lodge: Coal Town of the Clark’s Fork Valley

Posted on September 19, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Clark's Fork River, off U.S. 212, Carbon County, MT

When the Northern Pacific Railroad entered the Yellowstone Valley in the 1880s, officials and investors immediately began the search to find and acquire locally available deposits of coal. First there came the Klein mines north of Billings and then by the end of the decade, the first move toward mines to the south, in the Clark’s Fork Valley, at what would become Carbon County with its major town of Red Lodge on Rock Creek. Development began slowly, with the Depression of 1893 intervening, but as the era’s financial and railroad magnates combined the Great Northern, the Burlington Route, and the Northern Pacific into one huge co-operative venture, they selected a new place in the Yellowstone Valley, a town called Laurel at the confluence of the Clark’s Fork and Yellowstone rivers, to connect the three railroads. In short order, a Northern Pacific Railroad spur line was built down the Clark’s Fork Valley to the place called Red Lodge–U.S. Highway 212 follows this route–and the boom was on.

Entering Red Lodge from the north via U.S. 212 you encounter immediately the town’s roots as a railroad town, as the historic Northern Pacific depot remains rooted at the head of the town. Here is where my long-interest with the Red Lodge story began in 1984 when

I met with a small group of local historians, preservationists, and civic leaders determined to keep Red Lodge and its still intact historic environment together. The group’s vision for the depot was for it to be a visitor center, an arts center, but more than anything a community center, a visible sign of the turnaround that could happen. Already, at the head of town artist Peter Toth had begun the new tradition with his mammoth wood sculpture, “In Honor of a Proud and Noble People,” installed in 1979, a theme of the region’s

Native American history and proximity to the Crow Indian Reservation that also was captured in a much more commercial way by the neon sign of the Red Lodge Cafe then, and still to my mind, the best place in town. The neon, like Toth’s sculpture, was designed

to attention of the one course of heritage tourism income that locals recognized: that summer traffic coming out of Billings and off the interstate heading to Yellowstone National Park via U.S. 212 and the Beartooth Pass, one of the true highway wonders of the United States. How to get people to stop, and how to restore pride and hope for the town itself: those motivated the group I met in 1984 moreso than any well meaning goal of merely preserving history and pretty buildings.

To say that the initial depot project was successful would be an understatement. Thirty years later the depot is a public space that includes a gazebo, outdoor art, and a setting of history and culture rarely rivaled in the region. As you move south from the depot, you also immediately encounter several of the dreams the groups discussed in 1984: a National Register of Historic Places historic district (there are now more than one); restored and treasured public buildings such as the Carnegie Library and Carbon County Courthouse;

and their biggest goal of all in 1984, the acquisition, preservation, and transformation of iconic Labor Temple into a history museum and heritage center for the Carbon County Historical Society.

The group understood the power of the Labor Temple: they could tell a story not just of railroad magnates and economic development but could look at this history from those who came and labored in the mines, and built the town. The building dated to the decade of Red Lodge’s height, 1910-1920, when the town’s population reached 5,000 but especially once the Northern Pacfic opened new mines at Colstrip to the east in the 1920s, the town had been in a decades long period of population decline, where less than 2,000 people lived in 1980. Many had given up, obviously, but those who stayed saw the bones of a possible community renaissance–and preservation was a big part of that. That more recent story comes next.

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Montana's Historic Landscapes

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