Heard this afternoon that the Graves Hotel, a National Register landmark in Harlowton , has been lost to fire.
One of my favorite places and the last place I stayed in Montana in 1985 before moving to Tennessee
One of the best railroad hotels in Montana from the days of the Milwaukee Railroad c. 1908.
After my comprehensive work in Montana from 1984-85 I returned in 1988 to revisit and add new places to my visual understanding of the state. Here are most of the color slides I took in Sheridan County on my second trip to Plentywood and environs.
I particularly looked at the railroad corridors–big surprise I know. Above is the Great Northern depot at Medicine Lake and below is a similar combination of Great Northern depot and elevators at Antelope.
The other railroad corridor I wanted to look at was the Soo Line, which operated a short spur line into the county in the early 20th century. I’m glad I did since hardly any buildings exist along this route today. Below is the T-town plan of Outlook.

Outlook in 1988 still had its classic Soo Line combination depot, with both passenger services, baggage warehouse and station office wrapped in one building. Below is the Outlook railroad corridor.
The station was in fair condition then (it is gone now) and I took a couple of images along with a close-up of the two-seat privy.
Other “towns” on the Soo Line had nothing left but deteriorating elevators. Here in 1988 was what was left in Raymond.
In Plentywood, the county seat, I took images of the great fairgrounds sign and the New Deal-era Sheridan County Courthouse.
I also was so happy to see the Orpheum movie theater still in operation.
Finally I always have found it fascinating that at Plentywood’s main intersection stood 3 bank buildings at the three corners–and at Montana’s best known socialist county in the early 20th century.
And in 1988 I also took care to document the town’s Northern Pacific depot. Railroads and banks dominated the county at its founding.
Last scenes: the Flandrem community monument on Highway 16 and a bit of badlands scenery along Highway 5 (the image is from my original trip in 1985, this the bit of snow, taken February 1985).
In late may I return to the Big Sky Country, my first visit in two years, when I will once again be looking for changes in the historic built environment as I speed along the state’s
highways and backroads, crossing the bridges over the Yellowstone River, and trying my best to catch as many Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad freight trains as possible, although I doubt that I will ever have such a fun moment than in 2013 when I
caught this freight along the original Great Northern route while I was driving on the original–still dirt and gravel–road of U.S. Highway 2 between Tampico and Vandalia.
Certainly I will keep my eye out for Montana’s famed wildlife, although I don’t expect again to see a bighorn sheep outside of Glasgow, especially one being chased by a dinosaur. I will also stay on the lookout, as regular readers of this blog well know, for the beef–it is rarely a question of where’s the beef in Montana.
No doubt there will be both new and older historical markers to stop and read; the evolving interpretation of Montana’s roadside continues to be such a strong trend.
And through all of the brief stay in the state–perhaps 10 days at the most–I will also stop and enjoy those local places, far removed from the chain-drives roadside culture of our
nation, where you can enjoy a great burger, rings, and shake, like Matt’s in Butte, or a good night sleep at any of the many “Mom and Pop’s” motels along the state’s highways, such as this one in Big Timber.
See you on the road!
Kevin, Montana
When I began my explorations of Montana’s Big Sky Country in the early 1980s one structure particularly captivated me–the grain elevator. Certainly I had encountered these in the east, but in Montana, particularly in the high country of eastern Montana, the looming presence of grain elevators marked settlements both past and present. The elevators might be old and abandoned, like the one above at Kevin in Toole County or concrete and vibrant like the sets below from Glasgow.
But wherever they were located, they spoke of the promise of the homesteading generation and the very different reality of modern corporate agriculture of the second half of the 20th century into the 21st century. Thus, this post does not promise much analysis–I have tackled the topic in other posts–but it does include some of my favorite images of Montana elevators from my field study of 2012-2015.
Laredo, Hill County.
Highwood, Cascade County.
An elevator canyon in Joplin.
Made, Daniels County.
Reserve, Sheridan County.
Perhaps my favorite image–Square Butte elevators just before a hail storm.
Whitetail on the Soo Line Corridor near the Canadian border.
Windham, Judith Basin County
When I carried out the 1984-1985 survey of Montana as part of the state historic preservation planning process, one resource was at the forefront of my mind–railroad passenger stations. Not only had recent scholarship by John Hudson and John Stilgoe brought new interest to the topic, there had been the recent bankruptcy of the Milwaukee Road, and the end of passenger service in large parts of the state, except along the Hi-Line of the old Great Northern Railway (where Amtrak still runs today.)
The mid-20th century standardized design for Great Northern stations at Chester on US 2.
Some of the passenger stations in the major cities had already been converted into new uses, such as restaurants, offices, and various downtown commercial uses. The lovely turn of the twentieth century stations for the Great Northern (left) and the Milwaukee Road (right) in Great Falls showed how the location of the buildings, plus their
architectural quality and the amount of available space made them perfect candidates for adaptive reuse. While the tenants have changed over the past 30 plus years, both buildings still serve as heritage anchors for the city. While success marked early adaptive reuse projects in Great Falls and Missoula, for instance, it was slow to come to Montana’s largest city–the neoclassical styled Northern Pacific depot was abandoned and
deteriorating in the mid-1980s but a determined effort to save the building and use it as an anchor for the Montana Avenue historic district has proven to be a great success in the 21st century.
In the 1984-1985 I documented hundreds of railroad depots across Big Sky Country. From 2012-2015 I noted how many had disappeared–an opportunity to preserve heritage and put a well-located substantial building for the building back to work had been wasted. But I also came away with a deep appreciation of just how many types of new lives train stations could have.
Turning iconic buildings into community museums is a time-honored tradition, as you can find at the magnificent Northern Pacific station at Livingston, shown above. A handful of Montana communities have followed that tradition–I am especially glad that people in Harlowton and Wheatland County banded together to preserve the
Milwaukee Road depot there, since Harlowtown was such an important place in the railroad’s history as an electric line.
But there are so many other uses–as they know in Lewistown. Already in the mid-1980s investors in Lewistown had turned the old Milwaukee Road station, shown above, into a hotel and conference center, the Yogo Inn. When I visited Lewistown in 2013 the Yogo was undergoing a facelift after 30 years as a commercial business. The town’s other
historic depot, a substantial brick building (above) from the Great Northern Railway, was a gas station, convenience mart, office building, and store, all in one.
Deer Lodge is blessed with both of its historic depots. The Milwaukee Road depot has become a church while the Northern Pacific depot became the Powell County Senior Citizens Center. Indeed, converting such a community landmark into a community center is popular in other Montana towns, such as the National Register-listed passenger station shown below in Kevin, Toole County, near the border with Canada.
One of the most encouraging trends of this century is how many families have turned depots into their homes–you can’t beat the location and the long, horizontal nature of the often-found combination depot (passenger station and luggage warehouse in same building) means that these dwellings have much in common with the later Ranch-style houses of the 1950s and 1960s.
A former Great Northern depot in Windham.
A Milwaukee Road depot turned into a home in Rosebud County.
But in my work from 2012-15 I found more and more examples of how local entrepreneurs have turned these historic buildings into businesses–from a very simple, direct conversion from depot to warehouse in Grassrange to the use of the Milwaukee Road depot in Roundup as the local electric company office.
As these last examples attest–old buildings can still serve communities, economically and gracefully. Not all historic preservation means the creation of a museum–that is the best course in only a few cases. But well-built and maintained historic buildings can be almost anything else–the enduring lesson of adaptive reuse
West Yellowstone and Dillon are Montana’s best examples of railroad towns developed by the Union Pacific. Dillon is the oldest, established as the company’s spur line, the Utah and Northern, pushed north from the main line and headed into the rich mining country of Silver Bow County and environs. Not only is the historic Union Pacific depot–part of the railroad’s Oregon Short Line–extant, and used as a county museum and theater, so too is the symmetrical town plan of the early 1880s, with the town’s primary commercial blocks facing the tracks.
This birds-eye view of the town is at the Beaverhead County Museum at the railroad depot. It shows the symmetrical plan well, with two-story commercial blocks facing the tracks and depot, which was then just a frame building. To the opposite side of the tracks with more laborer cottages and one outstanding landmark, the Second Empire-style Hotel Metlen. The Metlen, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, remains today, one
of the state’s best examples of a railroad hotel. I recognized the building as such in the 1984 state historic preservation plan and my book, A Traveler’s Companion to Montana History, included the image below of the hotel.
This three-story hotel served not only tourists but especially traveling businessmen–called drummers because they were out “drumming up” business for their companies. The interior has received some restoration work in the last 30 years but little has changed in the facade, as they two images, one from 1990 and the other from 2012, indicate.
The same can be said for the ornate cast-iron Victorian-styled cornices on the commercial buildings directly across from the depot. First is a black and white image, c. 1990: note the middle cornice. The next image, from 2012, shows that the details have been lost in the last 30 years although most of the cornice is intact.
The Dingley and Morse Block from 1888–seen in the historic image of the town at the museum above–has been well preserved and is a significant example of how cast-iron facades defined the look of businesses in Montana’s late 19th century railroad era.
This brief look at Dillon as a railroad town is just the beginning of our exploration of this southwest Montana county seat. Today Dillon is known as the home of the Patagonia outlet–certainly a key business development here in the 21st century. But the town’s
built environment has many stories to tell.
Monida, at the Idaho-Montana border, on Interstate I-15.
Country towns of Beaverhead County–wait, you cry out: isn’t every town in Beaverhead County a country town? Well yes, since Dillon, the county seat, has a single stop light, you can say that. But Dillon is very much an urban oasis compared to the county’s tiny villages and towns scattered all about Beaverhead’s 5,572 square miles, making it the largest county in Montana.
Let’s start this theme with the railroad/ federal highway towns. Monida, at the state border with Idaho, is a good place to start, first established as a place on the Utah and Northern Railroad line as it moved north toward the mines at Butte in 1881. Monica had a second life as a highway stop on the old U.S. Highway 91 that paralleled the tracks, as evident in the old garages left behind.
The next town north on the corridor created by the railroad/highway/interstate is Lima, 
which possesses a Montana welcome center and rest stop. That’s important because at this stop you also can find one of the state’s mid-20th century examples of a tourist welcome center, which has been moved to this stop and then interpreted as part of the state’s evolving roadside architecture.
Lima is a classic symmetrical-plan railroad town, the plan favored by the engineers of the Utah and Northern as the railroad moved into Montana. The west side of the tracks, where the two-lane U.S. Highway 91 passed, was the primary commercial district, with several brick and frame two-story buildings ranging from the 1880s to the 1910s.
The east side, opposite old U.S. Highway 91, was a secondary area; the Lima Historical Society is trying to keep an old 1880s building intact for the 21st century.
The town’s comparative vitality is shown by its metal Butler Building-like municipal building, and historic churches, ranging from a early 20th century shingle style to a 1960s contemporary style Gothic church of the Latter Day Saints.
The town’s pride naturally is its school, which developed from the early 20th century two-story brick schoolhouse to become the town’s center of community.
Eight miles to the north is a very different historic schoolhouse, the one-story brick Dell school (1903), which had been converted into a wonderful cafe when I stopped in 1984. It is still a great place–if you don’t stop here for pie or a caramel roll (or both), you goofed.
The Calf-A is not the only place worth a look at Dell, a tiny railroad town along the historic Utah and Northern line, with the Tendroy Mountains in the background. Dell still has its 
post office, within its one store, its community hall, and a good steakhouse dive, the false-front Stockyard Inn. But most importantly, for an understanding of the impact of World
War II on Montana, Dell has an air-strip, which still contains its 1940s B-17 Radar base, complete with storehouse–marked by the orange band around the building–and radar tower. Kate Hampton of the Montana State Historic Preservation Office in 2012 told me to be of the lookout for these properties. Once found throughout Montana, and part of the guidance system sending planes northward, many have disappeared over the years. Let’s hope the installation at Dell remains for sometime to come.
There are no more towns between Dell and Dillon but about halfway there is the Clark Canyon Reservoir, part of the reshaping of the northwest landscape by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in the 1960s. The bureau in 1961-1964 built the earthen dam and created the
reservoir, which inundated the small railroad town of Armstead, and led to the re-routing of U.S. Highway 91 (now incorporated into the interstate at this point).
The reclamation project, which stored water for irrigation, also covered the site of Camp Fortunate, a very important place within the larger narrative of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and its relationships and negotiations with the Shoshone Indians. An early
effort to mark and interpret the site came from the Daughters of the American Revolution, who not surprisingly focused on the Sacajawea story. Reclamation officials added other markers after the construction of the dam and reservoir.
In this century the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail has added yet another layer of public interpretation in its attempt to tell the whole story of the expedition and its complicated relations with the Native Americans of the region.
North of Dillon along the old route of U.S. Highway 91 and overlooking the corridor of the Utah and Northern Railroad is another significant Lewis and Clark site, known as Clark’s Lookout, which was opened to the public during the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial of the early 21st century.
The lookout is one of the exciting historic sites that have been established in Montana in the 30 years since my initial survey for the state historic preservation plan. Not only does the property interpret an important moment in the expedition’s history–from this vantage point William Clark tried to understand the countryside before him and the best direction to take–it also allows visitors to literally walk in his footsteps and imagine the same perspective.
Of course what Clark viewed, and what you might see, are vastly different–the tracks of the Utah and Northern, then route of old U.S. 91 are right up front, while the town of Dillon creeps northward toward the lookout.
Our last stop for part one of Beaverhead’s country towns is Glen, a village best accessed by old U. S. Highway 91. A tiny post office marks the old town. Not far away are two historic 
North of Glen you cross the river along old U.S. Highway 91 and encounter a great steel tress bridge, a reminder of the nature of travel along the federal highways of the mid-20th century.
In the past posts I revisited the two Daniels County towns at the “end of the line” of a spur line constructed by the Great Northern Railway in the early 1910s as a way of countering the push into northeastern Montana by the Soo Line at the same time. These attempts at railroad expansion and town building took root during the homesteading boom of that decade. Now with depots gone and residents drifting away, the old railroad corridor as it stretches from Opheim on the west end to its junction with the main line at Bainville, takes on the appearance of a ghost line, attested by the image above from Homestead and the one below from Reserve,both in Sheridan County.
At the rough mid-point of this spur line lies Plentywood–rather forsaken spot I thought in 1984 but a town now actually facing too much growth, too fast as the need for residences and space for the thousands of Bakken oil field workers seeps into northeast Montana. In 2013, the impact on Plentywood and Medicine Lake to the south was apparent as this just opened man camp at Medicine Lake shows.
Plentywood was of considerable interest to me because once the initial homestead boom turned to disaster in Sheridan County by the time of the Great Depression, there was a local movement to create a communist party. This story was known in 1984 but now we have full accounting due to the research of Sheridan County native Verlaine Stoner McDonald in her book The Red Corner (2010).
Plentywood has a classic T-plan town, with its depot and huge grain elevators defining what was the head of the town–and then a long “stem” of the T, where first came the commercial district, then a residential district, and finally at the “bottom” of the T: the county courthouse.
Plentywood’s T-town plan, looking from the courthouse
Montana's Historic Landscapes 