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.

The High Prairie of Stillwater County

Posted on August 30, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Stillwater County is one of the most beautiful spots in all of the Yellowstone Valley. The parallel routes of the Yelllowstone River, the c. 1882 corridor of the Northern Pacific Railroad, the c. 1920 route of old U.S. Highway 10 and the modern marvel of Interstate I-90, shown above, define the county’s historic landscape for most residents, and travelers.

But running directly north from the county seat of Columbus is a two-lane Montana highway that takes you to a totally different landscape, that of the high prairie of thousands of acres of wheat fields. The road ends about 20 or so miles away at the town of Rapelje, a promising trade center when it was first established as a railroad branch in 1913

during the homesteading boom but now one of the region’s small country towns, defined by its school, its church, its cafe, and its grain elevators. Its set of four early 20th century elevators, standing as sentinels of settlement but also as just man-made landmarks in a vast landscape of seemingly nothingness, is a remarkable statement of the built environment of Montana’s homesteading era.

Businesses are few and far between–the handful of local residents and scattered ranch families take their business to Columbus, or a bit farther to Laurel and Billings. There is still a town cafe–the Stockman Cafe–which is run as a volunteer cooperative for those passing through. The past few summers a June bike race has become a popular fund-raiser for the cafe.

The town has retained two public buildings–its post office and its school, the pride of the community, which was built in 1920 and has since been renovated and expanded with a new wing to the rear of the historic building. The school is home to the Rapelje Rockets.

With less than 100 residents in Rapelje, the school educates ranch kids living throughout the county’s high prairie, a role similar to the local post office, which despite threats last decade to close many of the state’s rural post offices, still serves this farming community.

The loss of population means that Rapelje has just two primary sacred places: the Gothic-styled community church, built during the initial decade of settlement, and the town

cemetery, which is located south of the village on a rise that overlooks the open prairie in all four directions. Of course, as Rapelje fades into the past, the cemetery grows in its number of headstones–a sign of what limits the future holds for this high prairie town.

More Landmarks from Sweet Grass County

Posted on August 23, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Big Timber and Sweet Grass County, in the heart of Montana’s Yellowstone Valley, create an imposing built environment set in a beautiful county, framed by mountains and defined by historic river corridors and later transportation routes. In the last post, I focused on Big Timber, its public spaces, its town plan, and the properties there already listed in the National Register. Today I want to focus on other just as worthy historic properties found both in town and in the county.

Let’s start with landmarks from the New Deal era. The town city hall/ fire hall is recognized but just southwest of Big Timber is the Mountain View Cemetery, which received a new stone gate, cemetery office, and other landscaping improvements from the WPA in the late 1930s. It is a splendid small town historic cemetery, with its majestic setting providing a proper dignity to those town founds, and generations of later residents, buried there.

The beautiful stone masonry of the cemetery reflected a vernacular theme already noted in the Sweet Grass County Courthouse and St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. But the smart use of stone throughout the town’s residential district is a significant design theme, from the magnificent Lutheran Church above to numerous examples of early 20th century homes.

Indeed, community institutions could be another important theme to explore in the built environment of Sweet Grass County. In addition to the town’s churches, schools, courthouse, and New Deal-era public park, downtown Big Timber still has a thriving bowling alley, the American Legion Hall, and the active Civic Center

Certainly community landmarks are a useful way to think about Melville, once an important trade town at the north end of the county on U.S. Highway 191. The town now lies just west of the realigned highway but it is worth a brief detour, if for no other reason than one of the state’s great rural churches, the Melville Lutheran Church.

When I encountered this gable-front vernacular Gothic church in March 1984, its unadorned beauty framed by the Crazy Mountains was a take-your-breath away experience. I featured the church in my A Travelers Companion to Montana History book on page 121, and noted the congregation, established in 1885, had built the church in 1914. It has weathered the subsequent 100 years well, as the image below shows. The stewardship of the congregation in maintaining the building, when so many other rural churches have closed in the last 30 years, is to be congratulated.

But Melville has more than the church–its rural school is still there, and probably as old as the church, serving as public space within the shadows of the Crazy Mountains.

Finally, back in the center of the county, let’s close with the Yellowstone River. Now at a public access site just north of Big Timber and just west of U.S. 191 is a Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail site that interprets the expedition’s experience at this spot in 1806.

This beautiful spot sums up the special quality of Sweet Grass County–a beautiful natural landscape that has been shaped in expected, and unexpected, ways by 200 years of history.

Chouteau County’s Plains Country Towns

Posted on August 16, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Thirty years ago geographer John Hudson wrote a series of articles and a book on the topic of “plains country towns,” addressing the landscape patterns he found among the railroad-established towns of the northern plains. Ever since Hudson’s concept of plains country towns has influenced how I look at the Montana’s small towns. Even in such river counties as Chouteau County where the Missouri River trade base of Fort Benton has dominated the county’s economy and population since the mid-19th century, you can still find the unmistakeable imprint of the railroad and the grain elevators that mark the presence of a town.

Earlier in this blog I have discussed Square Butte (above) and Geraldine. Today I want to review two other small towns, Highwood and Carter. Highwood is the largest, counting

just about 175 people in the last census. Like most plains country towns, it has steadily lost population in the last 50 years. In fact this weekend’s Great Falls Tribune discussed how the Highwood High School was going to forge a co-op for sports with Geraldine so both schools could continue to have basketball, volley ball and 7-man football, played at this tiny field in Highwood.

The Highwood School is no doubt the pride and center of this community, a place not often found by travelers nestled as it is in a gulch formed by Highwood Creek along Montana Highway 228. It began in the 1880s as cattle country but with the coming of the railroad in the 1910s t became an outlet for grains, as its set of tall elevators makes apparent. A small one-story false front building for the 1912 Highwood Mercantile Company also remains to mark the town’s railroad years.

Carter has one-third the population of Highwood–only about 50 people in the 2010 census–but is better known to travelers due to its location along U.S. Highway 87 between Great Falls and Fort Benton. The Rocking K Bar is the roadside landmark but travelers

should turn south and drive down into Carter proper since the town, despite its tiny number of residents, still has many of the community institutions that defined a proper plains country town of 100 years ago.

First, there is the still operating Carter Elementary School, probably the one institution that keeps the town alive–when country towns lose their school soon everything else goes too.

Next comes the tracks, railroad depot, and the grain elevators–while not public institutions they do give the community commercial lifeblood, and as long as the trains roll by there remains an economic reason for Carter to exist.

The depot has been moved from its original location paralleling the tracks, but this early 20th century standardized designed combination depot for the Great Northern Railway still stands–there were hundreds across the state in my survey of 1984-1985 and one of the more disturbing trends of the new survey of 2013-2015 is how many Great Northern depots are gone, eliminating from the landscape they once dominated.

Faith too has remained in Carter, with the persistence of the town’s small vernacular styled gable-front little white Methodist church, although in its first generation several congregations had been established here.

Carter also still has its Community Hall–an institution across the northern plains that defined hope and persistence in the years following the homesteading bust of the 1920s.

Community halls too were more numerous in 1984-1985 than today–the building in Carter is a significant community link between past and present.

Finally there is the federal presence–marked by a concrete block post office from the last decades of the 20th century. The threat a few years ago to close hundreds of rural post offices across the region brought new, and necessary, addition to role of post offices as modern community landmarks for plains country towns.

Admittedly, Carter is a place that hundreds roar pass daily as they drive U.S. Highway 87. But with its extant school, depot, brace of elevators, church, community hall, and post office, Carter is a valuable physical document of the plains country towns that once populated eastern Montana, serving as important way stations along the metropolitan corridors of rails and sidings that crisscrossed the west.

Grassrange: Fergus County Crossroads

Posted on August 5, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Grassrange is a central Montana crossroads, where U.S. Highway 87 meets Montana highways 19 and 200, and it serves as the eastern gateway to Fergus County. The wonderful vernacular roadside statement of “Little Montana”–an obvious homage to the much larger and more famous “Little America” in southeast Wyoming–reminds even the most oblivious traveler that you have reached a highway crossroads.

As the name implies, this is ranching country, with several of the state’s most famous spreads nearby. The school reflects the pride in ranching, witness its school emblem and name the Rangers.

There is more than livestock to the history of Grassrange, as the elevators attest. This is also farmers’ country since the early 20th century homesteading boom. Yet Grassrange has never been a bit town itself. It dates to 1883 when the first post office was stab listed to serve surrounding ranchers; the town still has its standardized 1970s post office building.

Grassrange has a definite sense of its past. Despite its scant population–just over 100 in the 2010 census–it has a city park (top image of this blog) plus its own public interpretation of its history, literally carved from local hands.

It also has surviving historic landmarks, from a false-front Masonic Lodge to a vernacular Gothic-styled United Methodist Church, to a well-worn one-block commercial building that, considering its add-ons and alterations, has served the community in several different ways over the last 100 years.

Many rural Montana crossroads are little more than a combination bar/cafe/store/gas station today. Grassrange has dwindled in size since my first visit in 1984 but it has kept its school and such community buildings as the church, Masonic hall, and city park. It is home than the home of “Little Montana”; it’s a reminder of the precarious state of Montana’s small towns across the vastness of the northern plains.

Coffee Creek: More than a Romance Novel

Posted on August 2, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Coffee Creek, Montana, located on the high plains of northeastern Fergus County, is undoubtedly best known today as the backdrop for a series of Harlequin romance novels. The setting and the starkness of the landscape is probably not what you envision in a romance novel but it does convey the reality of what Coffee Creek was, and is, today.

Coffee Creek was a railroad town, established in the same year as many of its neighbors, in 1913. Unlike Denton to the east or Stanford to the south, Coffee Creek never grew beyond its booster beginnings. Like the others it had a state bank, a post office, school, churches. Today the post office remains–one of the best rural historic post offices of the region–but most everything else is closed. The church is a well-kept example of early

20th century vernacular Gothic design, but it no longer holds regularly scheduled services. It remains a community landmark.

Another community landmark is the building above, which I believe is a Community Hall from the 1920s or 1930s. Throughout rural Montana in the 1920s a movement began to build structures where the homesteaders who stayed could gather and have events, play basketball, or dance the night away. New Deal agencies in the 1930s built many more, like the one this blog has already recorded in Sanders, Montana. This building in Coffee Creek reminds me of the Sanders community hall–hopefully someone reading this blog can add details about it.

The volunteer fire hall, like the post office, is one community institution still in service to local residents and surrounding ranches as is the town cemetery, perched to the north, high on a hill overlooking the town, Highway 81, and ranches as far as you can see.

As the buildings of Coffee Creek fade away, here the cemetery will record the names of those who staked out this place as their home, while those who return to pay their respects will keep the memories of this disappearing place alive for as long as they remember to return.

Denton: Fergus County’s Agricultural Trade Centers

Posted on July 26, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Fergus County, with Lewistown as the county seat, lies at the heart of Central Montana. Although gold and other precious minerals were found at Maiden and other sites in the early years, the region grew once the railroads came at the turn of the century. More than a dozen substantial agricultural trade centers, all connected to Lewistown by the rails, soon surrounded the county seat. When I surveyed the region in the 1980s, the continued vitality of these towns impressed–and they still deserve a close look today.

In 1984 I came looking for railroad depots, frankly, but was blown away by the Farmers State Bank, one of the best “strongbox” style of small town banks I had encountered anywhere in Montana. The town then was in a pattern of slow, steady decline, from a high of 435 residents in 1950 to 356 in 1980. That rate in most Montana country towns meant that the bank was long gone–but here it remained and stood proudly along Highway 81.

Thirty years later, the bank building still made its statement of permanence in materials (brick) and in style along the highway. Indeed, the town’s population had continued to slip downward, especially in the last 20 years, reaching a mere 255 residents in the last census. But the bank remains–and even has a new addition to the rear of the building.

I passed by this iconic Fergus County building in late May of this year, just weeks after the completion of its merger with Dutton State Bank (another great building to be discussed later). All was well: it remained one of Denton’s anchors.

The town’s schools are another important anchor. The football field (see the first image) serves as the eastern gateway to Denton; the schools are bunched together as though they grew organically from that spot one hundred years ago and have evolved ever since.

True, Denton and its neighbor to the west Coffee Creek celebrated their centennials in 2013. And it was appropriate that a granary announced this fact since grain is king here. The elevators standing along the old Milwaukee Road line still boldly state the importance of agriculture to Denton. Even after the Milwaukee ceased operations in 1980 state officials worked with local governments and ranchers to create a new Central Montana line, which kept the elevators running, and in more recent times, has made Denton the western terminus of the popular Charlie Russell Choo-Choo excursion train.

Schools, a bank, and grain elevators are anchors but Denton also has maintained vibrant cultural institutions from its town library, housed in a brilliant c1960 building, and churches such as the historic Gothic-styled Our Savior Lutheran Church and St. Anthony Catholic Church.

Residents also have kept the local Masonic Lodge in operation, housed in the 2nd floor of the post office building, which, due to its overall neoclassical style-appearance and corner lot setting, was probably a bank building built shortly after Denton became a town in 1913.

Toston: Another Northern Pacific Town in Broadwater County

Posted on July 11, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Toston has become a forgotten town of the Northern Pacific Railroad line as it stretched from Logan, in Gallatin County, through the headwaters of the Missouri River and into the broad Missouri River valley of Broadwater County. Today Toston is best known to travelers of U.S. 287 as a scenic stop on the Missouri River, and the access to Toston Dam reservoir, a project of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

The town’s heyday came early, especially with the discovery of pyrite goal ore at Radersburg to the west in the Elkhorn Mountains and the establishment of a smelter at Toston in the late 1880s. In the 21st century the old smelter site has received a superfund clean-up and a large interpretive marker explains the smelter and its impact on both Toston and Radersburg, another good example of the much better public interpretation you can encounter on the Montana landscape.

At the Missouri River fishing access, Montana Wildlife and Park erected another interpretive marker, a huge boulder marking the location of the Lorentz homestead. William B. Lorentz was the Northern Pacific’s agent in Toston and he filed for a homestead along the Missouri south of the tracks in 1887.

Toston had a second economic boom during the homesteading era when state officials decided to build a new steel truss bridge over the Missouri River. The Toston Bridge was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2005. Its interpretive marker records that state engineer Charles A. Kyle designed “a riveted steel Warren through truss design”

for the bridge in 1918, with Security Bridge Company of Billings as the contractor. The Billings company used 11 local residents, including William Lorentz, the former Northern Pacific station master. and the bridge was opened in the summer of 1920. Soon thereafter, the Bureau of Reclamation announced its intention to create a new irrigation project, initially called the Townsend Bench project. Reclamation officials designed a project for what they called 15,000 “excellent acres,” irrigated by a gravity system with the diversion dam located east of Toston on the Missouri River, identified today as the Crow Creek Pump Unit. Consequently, Toston has several buildings remaining from the first two decades of the 20th century, including concrete block commercial buildings and the town’s most impressive building, a two-story frame school, which is now a private residence.

With the irrigation project came a set of large grain elevators, which in 1984 dominated the highway view of Toston along U.S. Highway 287. These have been demolished. One historic church building, I believe it is a Methodist Church, remains but does not hold services.

The Toston Bridge kept the town vibrant since its location meant that all traffic between Helena and Bozeman on U.S. Highway 287 passed over the bridge, over the tracks, and through the middle of town. In 1955, however, a new bypass bridge was constructed and Toston began a decline that has slowly drained away most of its population. At the 2010 census, it had 108 residents.

A second look at Ringling

Posted on July 2, 2015 by carrollvanwest

Ringling, a stop along the Milwaukee Road in northern Meagher County just off U.S. Highway 89, served as the eastern gateway for the railroad’s move west into the Rocky Mountains along its electric line. From Ringling the Milwaukee passed through the famous Sixteenmile Canyon then crossed the Missouri at Toston and began its ascent in the copper kingdom of Butte.

I had last passed quickly through the village in 2011 and its iconic Milwaukee Road combination depot was weathered but appeared as if it would yet survive for sometime. Within four years, however, its fate was much more uncertain. Roof decking is missing–will this now rare survival of the railroad’s corporate stamp on the northern plains survive till the end of the decade?

Brumfield’s Garage is more an example of roadside architecture from the first half of the twentieth century than a building that dates back to the Milwaukee’s heyday. Its vernacular interpretation of Art Deco styling by means of the four brick pilasters catches the eye–this adaptable property has been many things, and in my past visits has served as a store and as a bar.

Ringling also retains its school–now a residence–another of the remarkable rural frame standardized designed schoolhouses found throughout central Montana. It sits south of the depot, as if the corporate and the public defined the north-south boundaries of the village.

Still overlooking the town, and serving as an important landmark on U.S. Highway 89, is the historic Arts and Crafts-styled St. John’s Catholic Church, to which I have already devoted one post in this blog. What I was pleased to find in 2015 is that some preservation work was underway–with weatherboards being repaired and replaced. With a decent roof and a recent paint job, the church is in much better shape than many of its brethren across the region. The continued use of this Montana plains church as a “community church” is the best way to keep it alive in the 21st century even as the rest of Ringling shrinks and disappears from the Meagher County landscape.

An Easter Greeting from St. Peter’s Catholic Mission

Posted on April 5, 2015 by carrollvanwest

In all of the justified and well-meaning excitement for a Great Falls of Missouri heritage area–an effort I fully support as an administrator of a statewide heritage area in Tennessee–let’s always remember the western end of Cascade County where so much started. The First Nations Buffalo Jump State Park at Ulm is the reminder of the centuries old Native American shaping of the landscape. Here, on a graveled road within a working ranch, stands another key National Register site where Catholic missionaries attempted to build a new world with Blackfeet Indian–St. Peter’s Catholic Mission.

Just getting there is awe-inspiring as the road winds its way around Crown Butte and through dazzling landscape of where the plains meet the mountains in Montana. St. Peter’s did not become a major settlement, despite its early founding–it seems in the middle of nowhere today, which it is, but in the mid-19th century it was right where it needed to be, at the intersection of Native American and white missionary culture.

The church itself is an unassuming log building, c. 1878, with a frame bell tower later later. But it was an outpost in that missionary effort among the Blackfeet 150 years ago. I wrote about this place and the later Holy Family Mission on the Blackfeet Reservation in en essay “Acculturation by Design” years ago so I won’t belabor the success and failure of those efforts here. You can see for yourself. Other remnants of the old mission school survive,

some barely hanging on, as they are still part of a working ranch. The cemetery high above the church, and every other part of the old mission, is probably the most compelling site. And a perfect place today, or any day for that matter, for contemplation of the story of men, culture, faith, and history on the northern plains.

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