Montana's Historic Landscapes

So many of the blogs in the last 3 weeks have spoken of looking and seeing change over a generation. But just as important as close viewing is close listening. The voices of Montana sound different from those of my native Tennessean but I often heard similar tales: themes of community, family challenge, opportunities lost and gained, the heavy hand of power be it capital or the federal presence, and the stories of the deeper past, called intangible by some but oh so tangible to those who touch it, feel it daily. The landscape loses meaning without the voices. The voices are lost without the landscape.

In 1984 I began my statewide fieldwork on the Hi-Line with Toole County being among the first stops. Here I encountered Devon, a town name that denotes rural beauty from Great Britain, but here along the Great Northern Railway and U.S. 2 it had become a forgotten place. I soon discovered that many other Devons existed in the region, and I talked about a good many of them in the “Travelers Companion to Montana History” book. Since that time, Don Baker has written “Ghost Towns of the Montana Prairie” that documents even more of these places. Three decades later, my basic question is: how many of these ghosts have now blown away leaving only scattered foundations behind? Those that remain are powerful physical documents of the Homesteading Era, which 100 years ago still held such hope and promise for the region.

Vast improvement in presentation and interpretation is a very clear trend that I found last year in the southwest corner of Montana. Fort Owen outside of Stevensville was one such place, here under the stewardship of the state. It was good to see improvement over 25 years but at the same time, the story at Fort Owen is BIG and nationally significant, I would claim. And the property today does not do justice to the park. Then there is the danger of development in and around Stevensville completely overwhelming the site. What will be the status of state historic sites and parks in northern Montana?

Then there is the personal side of exploring Montana’s historic landscape. My son Owen is named for this little but important place in a really big country.

My first stop in Montana will be Billings, the metropolis of eastern Montana. There new uses as a performance have made the Art Deco styled Babcock an important contributor to downtown life and business. In the 1980s most Hi-Line county seats had a movie house–have they survived the video, satellite, Internet onslaught? What about the transfer to digital technology for films? I will start to find out in less than 2 weeks.

Along the old main streets of the towns along U.S. 2 there is a wonderful array of historic store signs, many for restaurants and bars, others for stores or movie houses. These all speak to a time when U.S. 2 was a major east-west artery, long before interstate travel dominated auto and truck travel. In places like Shelby the row of signs can make the place look dated, but for heritage tourism travelers the signs beckon today as much as they did 60 years ago.

This image comes from my last quick trek through part of northeast Montana in 1988. The unstated classical beauty of this courthouse in Malta impressed then, and I trust it will still be as well maintained and preserved 25 years later. I’m in Malta at the end of Memorial Day weekend. Compared to Tennessee, where I have now worked for 28 years, courthouses and their grounds often appear as afterthoughts in the Montana landscape. Whereas the central courthouse square plans of Tennessee are at the center of the historic commercial district, I was reminded in my 2012 work in southwest Montana that often the Montana courthouses are on the margins (like the Beaverhead County Courthouse in Dillon) or nestled within residential districts (like in Deer Lodge). In the railroad towns of the Hi-Line, the depots are at the head of town and serve as the entrance to the primary commercial district. This spatial difference speaks both to when Montana county seats were created and to the overwhelming influence of the railroads in the region one hundred years ago. It is one of the most interesting patterns in the Hi-Line’s historic landscape.

St Mary’s Catholic Church in Stevensville is one of the most famous early buildings in the northwest. These types of sacred landmarks I documented adequately in 1984, but churches overall and sacred landscapes (such as cemeteries) not so much. My thinking then was that these places were not threatened, therefore I could give them less attention. Wrong. Here is a case where my southern work informs the new Montana project. Churches and cemeteries are powerful symbols of faith and commitment and just as important as community markers. The sacred landscape will receive considerable attention this summer.

Grain elevators and the Hi-Line–it seems that you cannot think of one without the other. If the Cottonwood church (previous post) was a human sentinel on the northern plains, the tall, stark, unadorned elevators are part of the corporate landmarks of the region. Here is where the intersection between the long hours of toil for Hi-Line farmers met the business reality of the railroad, and of the great grain wholesalers of the midwest. The elevators were early 20th century signs of progress; today they are often the only remaining markers of a town that has been long ago abandoned, hopes and dreams forgotten.

The Hi-Line is populated with scattered buildings and places that speak of the high hopes, and broken dreams of the homesteading era. One of the most compelling places I found in 1984 was at Cottonwood. Here was an abandoned church, dedicated with a flourish in 1924 judging from a historic photo in the 1976 county history. In 1984 the building was like a sentinel, standing alone on the high plains, of what people thought they could accomplish in a demanding, stark landscape. Will this building still remain today?–I find out in late May when I will be working in Hill County.

The foodie revolution is impacting heritage tourism in a big way in Tennessee. In southwest Montana last spring I found, to my great pleasure, many heritage cafes and restaurants still humming along, such as this 1930s counter at Gamer’s in Butte. But no doubt there are many more national chains in the state than before. Finding the heritage businesses of the Hi-Line and seeing how they made it through the last 30 years will be one of the fun patterns to explore starting May 23.