A Great Place to Gather

The remote Judith River Ranger Station traces its origin to 1906 when Forest Service Ranger Thomas Guy Myers took up residence in the newly created Jefferson National Forest. His challenge was to interpret and administer policies regarding public use of the area’s abundant natural resources.

Myers temporarily took over an abandoned miner’s cabin and set to building a field office and permanent home using a catalog-ordered “house kit.” He supplemented native logs and scrounged barbed wire from a nearby abandoned sawmill to reinforce the daubing. This kept the house snug in cold weather. The station’s simple square shape and use of recycled materials reflect the Forest Service conservation ethic. A log barn and corrals accommodated the horses and livestock needed for the ranger’s self-sufficiency.  

Myers married Emily McLaury in the early 1910s and brought her to the station. The couple made their remote quarters warm and inviting, adding bead board walls and wallpaper. The couple raised their son, Robert, at the station, and Emily taught school. The family lived there year-round until the early 1930s. Rangers thereafter occupied it seasonally until 1981.  

When Forest Service preservationists began extensive restoration, carpenters made wonderful discoveries. They found a teaching tool, forgotten beneath a layer of sheetrock, in young Robert’s upstairs bedroom. A historic timeline Emily drew on the wallpaper depicts the Stone Age and ancient Mediterranean history. Ranger Myers recycled everything. The house kit’s shipping crate framed the living and dining room doorway; wallpaper samples and opened mail filled in gaps around the windows and doors.

Today, visitors trade electricity and running water for a rare opportunity to live as the Myers family did a century ago. The station has an ambiance where the past and its energy linger. Remember this ghostly experience at the cabin?

The Judith River Ranger Station sleeps eight and is available for rental throughout the year. The station is equipped with propane heat, cook stove, and an adjacent modern vault toilet. For further information or to reserve the cabin, visit recreation.gov.

Mining Camp Architecture

Bannack, Virginia City, and Helena each had a turn as Montana’s territorial capital, but each was destined for a different future. Today Bannack is a state park whose empty buildings mostly date to the 1880s and later. Helena owes its survival beyond the mining phase to the Northern Pacific which linked the town to distant markets in 1883. Few 1860s gold camp remnants survive in Helena. But Virginia City has a remarkable fifty-one 1860s gold rush-era buildings. Virginia City’s buildings retain their antiquated storefronts. Only small panes of glass, packed in sawdust, could survive transport over rough terrain. So merchants used French doors that allowed maximum light into their stores. Helena once sported the same type of storefront, but with the advent of the railroad, storefronts were remodeled with big display windows. Lack of rail transportation is partly why most of Virginia City’s storefronts escaped remodeling. Virginia City’s 1860s buildings illustrate how frontier architecture was all about illusion. As the town transitioned from a temporary mining camp to a more permanent settlement, shop keepers began to add false fronts to the log cabins. False fronts were architecturally important to mining camps because they made buildings seem taller, larger, and grander than they really were. This offered residents a sense of security in remote places like Alder Gulch.  To the false fronts, shopkeepers began to add half-columns, arches, and medallions. These, crafted in wood on the frontier, mimicked the stone and brick ornamentation in the buildings of cities far away. Inside, muslin stretched smooth and tacked down over the rough log walls gave the illusion of plaster. Then, wallpaper applied over the muslin made primitive interiors seem like tastefully decorated rooms.

Muslin stretched smooth over log ceiling and walls, seen here in the McGovern Store,  made interiors seem like finished rooms.

Virginia City’s first substantial buildings, like Content’s Corner and the Kiskadden Barn, were of rubblestone. A layer of plaster scored to look like stone blocks covered the rough stones. The effect was dramatic. These survivors and historic photographs of them give us a real sense of early residents’ attempts at civilization.

The Kiskadden Barn sports a tall false front and a on the ground level, plaster  scored to look like cut stone.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 956-249

Reed and Bowles

The Reed and Bowles Trading Post outside Lewistown is a little-known gem well worth a visit. The oldest standing building in the area, the post originally stood about a mile and a half southeast of its present location. It was part of a short-lived post called Fort Sherman intended to serve a large Crow reservation, but by 1874 the plans for the reservation had fallen through. Construction of the Carroll Trail, a freighting route between Carroll on the Missouri River and Helena, prompted Alonzo S. Reed and John Bowles—a notorious pair—to purchase the post, dismantle it, and move it to its present site along Spring Creek.

Photo courtesy Montana State Historic Preservation Office

The post served traffic along the trail between 1875 and 1880 and catered to the many tribes passing through. Major Reed—so called from his brief stint as Milk River Indian agent from which he was fired—was the kingpin and Bowles was his assistant. Reed reputedly settled disputes with gunfire and planted his victims in the burial ground across the river. Bowles supposedly even sold the bones of his father-in-law, the Crow leader Long Horse, to an Irish ornithologist. The pair was well known for brutality toward their wives, drunken sprees, and trading liquor with the Indians, a violation of federal law. Reed and Bowles sold a wicked brew of ethanol laced with plug tobacco and red pepper. During the five years the post operated, visitors included American naturalist George Bird Grinnell, trader Pike Landusky, “Liver Eating” Johnson, and the Nez Perces, who stopped there briefly to rest in 1877 during their tragic flight from the U.S. Army.

Heikkila-Mattila Homestead

Finnish immigrant Gust Heikkila homesteaded along the Little Belt Creek coulee in 1902. Soon other Finnish settlers homesteaded the area, calling it Korpivaara, meaning “dangerous wilderness,” for its remote wooded surroundings. Here the Heikkilas raised eleven children, expanded their holdings, and were among the first to shift from farming to ranching. The skills of Gust and local Finnish builders Victor Mattila and Matt Maki reveal an outstanding folk vernacular building style that transferred the Finnish farmstead to a New World setting. The men showcased their traditional skills, building a sauna, residence, and other structures using Old World tools like the broadaxe and awl. The result is a classic Finnish farm with log buildings around an open courtyard. In 1938, the sons of Victor Mattila, who helped build the homestead, bought the property from the Heikkalas. The brothers, trained in woodworking by carpenter Matt Maki, expanded some of the buildings and also built new ones.

Barn built by John Mattila. Photo by Dena Sanford in Montana The Magazine of Western History, Winter 2013

The result is American in design but Finnish in construction. The 1938 barn, in particular, represents a masterful blending of the two cultures by second-generation Finnish builders. This unusual homestead, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, is one interesting example of building by Montana’s diverse European homesteaders.

A Monument to Convict Labor

Upon Statehood in 1889, the federal penitentiary at Deer Lodge, Montana, became a state institution. The prison housed 198 inmates in a cell block built to hold no more than 140. Prisoners spilled over into the outbuildings in the yard, the wash house, and the prison’s carpenter shop. Warden Frank Conley foresaw the deterioration of the prison if nothing were done to repair and expand it. But the state had no money. Conley was convinced, like other penal administrators of the time, that idle convicts bred trouble. The prison had no funds, but it did have untapped manpower. The Board of Prison Commissioners gave Conley permission to use convict labor to build a stone wall around the prison. The Commissioners hired James McCalman, a skilled stone and brick mason, to serve as architect, builder, and teacher. McCalman never drew a plan. He designed his projects entirely in his head, and then, with the help of his construction foreman, he taught the unskilled and inexperienced prisoners how to build what he envisioned.

James McCalman building the wall at Deer Lodge State Prison.
Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

Construction began in the spring of 1893 and it was a huge undertaking. Inmate crews first rerouted a Northern Pacific sidetrack to transport the buff-colored sandstone from a local quarry. The rail cars brought the raw chunks of stone directly through the prison’s main entrance and into the yard where inmates cut them. James McCalman ably taught the men and directed them in the construction of the elaborate wall. He designed the Romanesque-style enclosure, twenty feet high, with four massive round corner towers and two central square towers to resemble a medieval fortress. The walls extend four feet below ground to foil inmates who considered escape by tunneling beneath. The overall appearance not only brings to mind the medieval castle, but also the inevitable dungeon such places contain: a dark and dank place no one wants to visit.

Photo by J. M. Cooper, from Dark Spaces

When the imposing wall reached completion just one year later, incredulous officials pronounced it an architectural marvel and a “monument to convict skill and labor” unsurpassed in the United States.  It was the beginning of James McCalman’s long career designing and constructing buildings at the Montana State Prison.

Frank Lloyd Wright in Montana

In 1991, the American Institute of Architects honored Frank Lloyd Wright as the Greatest American Architect of All Time. His theory of organic architecture held that structures should be in harmony with humanity and the human environment. When he died in 1959, he had designed over five hundred homes and structures in thirty-six states and Japan, Canada, and England. Some four hundred remain today. Montana claims several examples of his work, including one project from 1908 when Wright’s career was just beginning to take off and another dating to the very end of his long architectural practice. The Como Orchards Colony, also known as the University Heights subdivision, in the Bitterroot Valley near Darby was an experimental planned community. Wright came to Montana in 1908 to research the site and designed the Como Orchards as a summer refuge for university professors.

The Como Orchards Colony lodge. Courtesy Treadway/Toomey Galleries

 A lodge and thirteen cottages were completed. One small cottage, a one-room cabin, and a tree-lined drive are all that remain today of Wright’s experiment. It was an innovative idea and a very early use of the prairie style that made Wright famous.

A Como Orchards Colony cabin. Courtesy ArchiTech Gallery.

He also designed the Bitterroot Inn at Stevensville, but it burned to the ground in the 1920s. The Lockridge Medical Clinic in Whitefish, built in 1961 1959, was one of Wright’s last designs. Dr. T. L. Lockridge insisted on the building’s construction even though his partners did not think it suitable as a medical clinic. For one thing, its hallways were too narrow for wheelchair access. When Lockridge died in 1964 1963, his two partners moved elsewhere, and Mrs. Lockridge sold the building. Now a law office, it is a surprising landmark in the middle of downtown Whitefish.

The Lockridge Medical Clinic in Whitefish

Update: Thanks to Ann Lockridge Christman for correcting the dates in the last paragraph.

B Street Brothels, Livingston

Every Montana town had its red light district, and remnants of these places survive in many communities. Buildings and houses have usually been adapted for other uses and their histories forgotten. One exception is the railroad town of Livingston’s quaint little B Street Historic District, once a thriving neighborhood that catered to railroaders. At one time there were nine houses. Five of them on the street’s east side survive. Built between 1896 and 1904, these unusual little cottages feature gables and porches that resemble those of larger homes. Identical in composition, they have front porches with thin columns and small attic windows. Each had two separate front doors, a brick chimney on each half, and three small rooms, called “cribs,” on each side.

There was also a small waiting area just inside each front door. Mid-range brothels like these often housed cribs enclosed within the house and were built without kitchens and bathrooms. These types of establishments were meant to look like real homes, but they had no conveniences. They gave patrons—in Livingston, mostly traveling railroad men—the impression of a “home away from home,” but in reality offered few creature comforts. Livingston’s B Street Historic District operated until it closed in 1948. Four of the cottages, resembling tiny wooden temples, retain good architectural integrity. Homeowners in one of the houses removed the partitions and added a loft. Wanting others to appreciate their home’s interesting history, they also preserved a patch in the floor, added during the historic period, to cover a hole worn by an iron bedstead.

P.S. Remember this brothel-turned-courthouse?

Reeder’s Bricks

Louis Reeder was a Pennsylvania brick and stone mason who came to Helena in 1867 not to mine, but to build. He knew that the community would need fireproof buildings, and that is how he intended to make his fortune. Soon he had a number of contracts, and he saved his money and invested in property. One of these properties was a collection of buildings that spread up a narrow alley. Reeder added to them. Eventually, thirty-two tiny one-room apartments offered miners better living conditions than the log cabins they were used to.

Reader's Alley today

The distinctive red bricks of Reeder’s Alley have been the subject of a persistent myth linking them to artist Charlie Russell. Russell’s family owned the Parker-Russell Mining and Manufacturing Company in St. Louis, Missouri, a leading maker of industrial fire brick. Rumor has it that some of the Reeder’s Alley bricks came by ox team from the Russell Company. Reeder’s Alley, however, contains no fire brick, and there was never a need to import building brick to Helena. By 1866, Nick Kessler was making both building and fire bricks. Industrial fire bricks were used, for example, in lining the lime kilns at the south end of West Main Street. Inspection of the kilns reveals a variety of imported fire brick from Chicago, St. Louis and elsewhere, but there are no Parker-Russell bricks in the kilns. There does, however, seem to be some truth to the rumor that Parker-Russell bricks came to Helena. The homeowner of the May Butler House at the end of South Benton Avenue discovered a large stash of unused bricks buried in the yard. These bear the surprising stamp of the Parker-Russell Manufacturing Company.

P.S. Remember this Reeder's Alley prank?

Fritz Augustus Heinze

Butte Copper King Fritz Augustus Heinze was dashing, aggressive, and unscrupulous. Women adored him, and he lived a fast and colorful, albeit short, life. In 1893 he formed an alliance with Copper King William A. Clark against their mutual rival Marcus Daly. After Daly’s death in 1900, Standard Oil Company acquired Daly’s influential Amalgamated Copper Mining Company. Heinze and Clark challenged its political and economic power. But mining fortunes made quickly could be lost just as fast. Standard Oil retaliated. Stock in Heinze’s own United Copper Company was mysteriously bought and sold. This and Heinze’s own financial indiscretions ruined him.

From Technical World Magazine, 1904, via Wikipedia

At the height of his legal and financial troubles, Heinze’s mining fortunes financed the handsome Metals Bank Building at Park and Main Streets. Nationally acclaimed architect Cass Gilbert designed the landmark in 1906 at the same time that he designed the Montana Club in Helena. Architecturally similar, both were pivotal buildings, constructed with new techniques that allowed multiple stories.

Courtesy Metals Bank Building

In 1914, Heinze died broke in New York City of cirrhosis of the liver; he was only forty-five. The Metals Bank Building is the only legacy he left in Montana.

P.S. Remember the cold-blooded shooting that took place where the Metals Bank Building stands today?
P.P.S. This caricature of Heinze seems pretty accurate.

Montana Club

Private men’s clubs had long been a fixture in cities back east, and as frontier settlements like Helena evolved from mining camps to towns, the uncouth image would no longer do. The first members of Helena’s far-famed Montana Club set out to prove their town as cultured as any other with elegantly appointed rooms beautifully furnished for the cultured enjoyment of its 130 members. Rules were strict. There was no gambling on club premises and no women allowed except at special events. The reading room artistically displayed all the latest newspapers. Missing was the popular Police Gazette because it was printed on pink paper and considered tacky. Bylaws forbade loud talking, eating, or drinking in the library, and neither were dogs or sleeping on the sofas allowed.

The original Montana Club (left) was destroyed in a fire in 1903. The current building (right) was finished in 1905.
Photos courtesy Helena as She Was

By the 1890s, rules relaxed and the club installed a basement bowling alley where, at certain times only, ladies were welcome. Another fund-raising scheme extended special ninety-day memberships to officers stationed at Fort Harrison. But some of the officers drank too much, became unruly, and even smuggled women into the club. Times do change! In the 1940s, the Montana Club installed slot machines in its lounge and opened the bar to women.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Here's a slideshow of historic photos of the Montana Club.

Red Lodge Mausoleum

Above-ground burials in mausoleums are the norm in Europe and in some places in the United States. In New Orleans, above-ground burials are required to prevent cemeteries from becoming bone gumbo during frequent flooding. While private mausoleums dot Montana cemeteries, above ground mass burials were never common practice. After 1900, inexpensive concrete construction made building large multiple crypt facilities economically feasible. At the same time, Progressive-era ideology was encouraging individuals to join together for community improvement. Thus, the communal mausoleum movement was born, placing above-ground entombment within financial reach of ordinary citizens. In 1921, the Consolidated Mausoleum Company advertised communal mausoleums in Montana newspapers. “The present high state of civilization demands,” read the ad, “a more humane and sanitary method of taking care of the dead, than found in earth burial.” This opportunity intrigued Red Lodge, and construction of a mass mausoleum engaged the community. More than two hundred people subscribed to the project, and construction of the mausoleum with more than two hundred crypts, or burial spaces, began along Montana Highway 78. Designed as a “time-defying” monument, its simple, but massive temple front, heavy bronze doors, and enormous Tuscan columns emphasize strength and permanence. The reinforced concrete walls are durable and moisture tight, fulfilling the requirements for the mausoleum to survive in perpetuity.

Courtesy Montana State Historic Preservation Office

Nationwide, hundreds of communities joined the movement, but the Red Lodge Communal Mausoleum, recently listed in the National Register of Historic Places, is one of only three identified in Montana. True to plan, the mausoleum housed Red Lodge citizens of all classes. Wealthy businessmen, immigrant coal miners, and their families, lie entombed together “within the walls of one building… imposing and everlasting.”

The Rush to Reeder’s Alley

Happy April Fool's Day. Don't get taken in!

Reeder’s Alley in Helena is a charming collection of tiny tenements that originally provided miners with better accommodations than the primitive log cabins typical of the of the gold rush. Built against the slope of the hill between 1873 and 1884, the one-room apartments were built by brick mason Lewis Reeder, who brought the row house style from his native Pennsylvania. He added a couple of western false fronts to achieve a unique architectural combination. When placer mining dwindled, working-class tenants replaced miners. By the 1890s, the alley was home to mostly single men, but they were cooks, hotel porters, laborers, sheepherders, and an occasional musician. This was long before the alley was neatly paved with brick as it is today. The narrow dirt street saw little traffic; it mostly served as a bridle path for horseback riders.

But for one day in 1897, according to the Helena Weekly Herald, the alley was famous. It was a spring day, and there had been a thunderstorm—the kind that comes up suddenly, sends torrents, and then ends abruptly. After the rain, the alley ran rivers of muddy rainwater. Streetcar operator Bob Murray was on his way home for mid-day dinner. He cut through the alley as was his habit, and as he made his way up the hill, sloshing through the aftermath of the storm, he noticed something glinting in the sunshine. There it lay in the gutter, washed out of the alley. Murray picked it up. It was a shiny gold nugget, later valued at $3.10.  Where there was one, there had to be more. Word spread through the neighborhood, and in a flash, there was a gold rush right there in the alley. Tenants, Chinese from nearby shanties, and passersby were soon mucking in the mud, proving that the frenzy of the gold rush was still alive. However, we can wonder today at the veracity of this report. It hit the paper on April 1, and so we will never know for sure.

Mining Camp Courthouses

The gold-rush-era towns of Bannack and Virginia City have something in common that has gone almost unnoticed. Bannack, originally the county seat of Beaverhead County, and Virginia City, the county seat of Madison County, share courthouses of very similar design built almost at the same time in the mid-1870s. Loren Olds was the architect of both buildings.

Madison County Courthouse, 1963. Photo by John N. DeHaas Jr.
Library of Congress, HABS MONT,1-BRAN,2--3

While the Madison County courthouse in Virginia City still serves the public housing county offices and the county courtroom, Bannack’s courthouse is known today as the Meade Hotel. That’s because in 1881, the seat of Beaverhead County moved to Dillon. The courthouse sat empty until 1888 when Dr. John Meade remodeled it into a hotel.

Original Beaverhead County Courthouse, 1963. Photo by John N. DeHaas Jr.
Library of Congress, HABS MONT,1-BRAN,2--2

If you have visited each of these two buildings, you may have noticed especially that their grand staircases are identical. These gracefully curving staircases are distinctive, with beautiful newel posts and banisters, manufactured in sections, by the same unknown competent craftsman.

Stairway to second floor, Beaverhead County Courthouse, 1963. Photo by John N. DeHaas Jr.
Library of Congress, HABS MONT,1-BRAN, 2--3

Each staircase has a window with a very deep sill, almost like a window seat. The two courthouses, also similar in exterior appearance, are important landmarks not only because they recall early territorial justice, but also because they were among the first architect-designed buildings on the Montana frontier.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Grand Union Hotel

Fort Benton’s beautifully restored hotel, the Grand Union, once welcomed travelers to the Gateway of the Northwest, offering them a luxurious refuge before they set out for less civilized destinations. Its opening in 1882 came at the end of the steamboat era when Fort Benton was still an unchallenged hub. But the very next year, the Northern Pacific stretched across Montana, bypassing Fort Benton and ending its reign as the Chicago of the Plains.


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 947-095


In its heyday, the Grand Union was the “Waldorf of the West.” It had a saloon, a grand dining room, a saddle room for cowboys to store their gear in winter, and a secret lookout room where guards could supervise gold shipments. A separate ladies’ stairway led to elegant parlors, since proper women never entered rooms adjoining saloons. Each bedroom had black walnut, marble-topped furnishings and its own woodstove and fancy chimney. From its vantage point near the docks, the Grand Union witnessed the arrival of everything from stamp mills to grand pianos brought by steamboat and transferred to freight wagons. The regal Grand Union reflects prosperity and optimism in a town unaware of the imminent coming of the railroad and the disastrous effects on its economy.

Have you ever stayed there?

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Thanksgiving Day Murder at Elkhorn

The silver mines at Elkhorn yielded $14 million and the mining camp once had more than 2,500 residents. Three passenger trains arrived weekly on the Northern Pacific’s branch line.


Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives

In 1893, the Fraternity Hall Association built the town’s architectural and social centerpiece. Fraternity Hall was aptly named: the town’s various fraternal organizations, including the Masons, Oddfellows, and Knights of Pythias, shared its upstairs lodge room. Dances, traveling theatrical troupes, graduations, prize fights, and other public gatherings at Fraternity Hall bound citizens together. The building’s outstanding architecture blends the western false front with a sophisticated twist. A unique neo-classical style balcony is suspended above the entry. After the Silver Panic of 1893, the mine began to play out and operated only off and on until 1931 when the Northern Pacific removed its tracks. Fraternity Hall has endured time, neglect, and heavy snows to become one of Montana’s most photographed buildings.


Gilliam's Hall and Fraternity Hall in Elkhorn

Although local lore says that an argument over a dance led to a murder at Fraternity Hall, the true incident actually began at a Thanksgiving Eve dance in 1889 at Gilliam’s Hall, Elkhorn’s other substantial surviving building. A shortage of women compelled Thomas King and George Peters to dance together. Manager Mat Fogarty asked them to stop. The ensuing quarrel later became a huge free-for-all bar fight at Lloyd’s Saloon. Taking their fight into the street early on Thanksgiving morning, King shot and killed Fogarty. Thomas King was hanged at Boulder for the crime in June of 1890, several years before Fraternity Hall was built. And this was especially noteworthy because King’s hanging was the first in the new state of Montana.

P.S. It makes Thanksgiving in Virginia City seem downright tame, doesn't it?

Robber’s Roost

Because events supposedly connected to Sherriff Henry Plummer and his suspected gang occurred near the Daly ranch in 1863 and 1864, mystery, legend, and mistaken identity have long been part of the history of the stage stop called Robber’s Roost. Although it never served as a gathering place for the road agents and no early-day murders have been documented there, the inn is historically important as a link between the two territorial capitals—Bannack and Virginia City—and one of few surviving log stage stations of this very early territorial period. Orlin Fitzgerald Gammell, who was born in 1846 and died in 1952, helped procure the logs that built Robber’s Roost. He says in his written reminiscence that ranch owner Pete Daly built the structure in the winter of 1866–1867, well after the vigilante hangings of Sheriff Henry Plummer and other suspected road agents.

From http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/

Robber’s Roost never served as a hideout for robbers during that turbulent time, but it did later serve as an inn and stage station along the busy road between Bannack and Virginia City. So-called Robber’s Roost is actually important for a different reason. It was the place where Bill Fairweather, credited as the discoverer of the vast Alder Gulch gold deposits, died in 1875. Mrs. Daly cared for him during the final stages of acute alcoholism. He died penniless at the age of thirty-nine.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Sedman House

One of Montana’s best-kept secrets is the Sedman House, a beautifully furnished territorial period home in Nevada City, now under state ownership and maintained by the Montana Heritage Commission. It originally stood in nearby Junction City where it was one of the first large homes built in the region in 1873. Its builder, Madison County rancher and territorial legislator Oscar Sedman, met an unfortunate end. In 1881 during the legislative session in Helena, he suddenly took ill and died of “black measles,” the tick-born disease we know today as Rocky Mountain spotted fever. Sedman was the first Montana legislator to die during a session. He left a wife and four small children. His colleagues paid him tribute by draping his official chair in black crepe, turning it backwards to face the wall. After Oscar’s death, two of the Sedmans’ four children died. Mrs. Sedman remarried and moved to Missoula.

Sedman House, June 12, 2009
Photo by E.L. Malvaney via Flickr

The Sedmans’ lovely home later became the Junction Hotel. After that, it served as a stable. Charles Bovey disassembled the badly deteriorated building and moved it a mile and a half to Nevada City where he put it back together. The home today is a focal point. The period furnishings include the desk of vigilante prosecutor Wilbur Fisk Sanders and Colonel Charles Broadwater’s personal gold-trimmed bathtub from his private suite at the far-famed Broadwater Hotel. A visit to the Sedman House in Nevada City is well worth it.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. This weekend would be an especially good opportunity to visit the Sedman House.

Daniels County Courthouse

Scobey, the seat of Daniels County, has Montana’s most unusual courthouse. It is a stunning false-fronted building, painted a crisp white. But it has a rather shady past. The building has been enlarged and remodeled inside. What was once a spacious hotel lobby is now divided into county offices. But the courthouse began as a hotel, built sometime before 1913 when the town of Scobey relocated from its original site along the Poplar River flats. This hotel had several owners, but during most of the teens, One-eyed Molly Wakefield owned the building. Molly was a rough character who earned her nickname because she was blind in one eye. A long scar ran across it, hinting at some violent episode in her mysterious past. She came on the train from Kansas City with her four sons, all her belongings, and money in her pockets. Molly bought real estate, including the hotel. She and her sons kept pit bulls for fighting staked between her hotel and the Tallman Hotel next door. There was gambling in Molly’s hotel, as there was in Scobey’s other hotels, but women were the main attraction. The hotel had no indoor bathroom facilities, although the first-floor rooms for entertaining were handily equipped with sinks. A large sleeping room upstairs accommodated legitimate overnight guests. In 1917, federal officials closed red light districts across the nation. One-Eyed Molly disappeared, and her hotel sat empty.



Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, 950-886

When Scobey became the county seat in 1920, officials had no reservations about taking over the old hotel. Even today, some of the county offices retain telltale sinks. It is Montana’s only brothel-turned-courthouse.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go
P.S. Remember this savvy madam?

Spokane

Not all of Montana's great athletes have been human. As we continue our look at sports history, let's remember a four-legged champion...

Noah Armstrong made a fortune in the Glendale mines southwest of Butte. He had a ranch in Madison County where he built a beautiful three-story round barn. If you drive along the highway near Twin Bridges in Madison County, you can see it off the highway. Its board-and-batten walls are painted red, and its shape is like a wedding cake, with each story smaller than the one below it.

Photo by Tom Ferris in Hand Raised: The Barns of Montana.

This barn is famous as the birthplace of the only Montana horse to win the Kentucky Derby. Armstrong invested some of his wealth in raising and racing thoroughbreds. In 1887 the famous racehorse Spokane was born in Armstrong’s round barn. A quarter-mile track inside the barn was the colt’s first training ground. Armstrong sent him to Tennessee for further training. In 1889 when Spokane was three, Armstrong entered him in the fifteenth Kentucky Derby. Spokane had only run a few undistinguished races. Bookies overlooked him at six to one odds, favoring the famous Proctor Knott, a proven winner who already had brought his owner seventy thousand dollars. That day at Churchill Downs, thousands witnessed the little copper-colored horse from Montana make racing history. He passed Proctor Knott at the finish line. Spokane went on to win two more big races: the American Derby at Churchill Downs and the Clark Stakes in Chicago, beating the mighty Proctor Knott both times. No other three-year-old horse has ever won all three great races. Spokane lives on in the annals of racing history.

From Montana Moments: History on the Go

Moss Mansion

The beautiful Moss Mansion in Billings—now a house museum—is a twenty-five-room residence built in 1903. It was the longtime home of the Preston Moss family. New York architect R. J. Hardenbergh, whose work includes New York City’s Waldorf Astoria, designed the elegant mansion. Mahogany and walnut woodwork, an onyx fireplace, rose silk and gold leaf wall coverings, and stained glass windows are among the luxurious details.
 

Montana Historical Society Photograph Archives, PAc 2004-17

Preston Moss arrived in Billings in 1892 on his way to Butte from Missouri and saw Billings’ financial promise. He became a prominent banker; helped develop the sugar beet industry, the Billings Light and Water Company, and the Billings Polytechnic Institute (now Rocky Mountain College); and with a partner ran eighty thousand head of sheep and several thousand head of cattle. He also pioneered the Billings Gazette and was instrumental in the creation of the Huntley Irrigation Project. He even started a toothpaste factory and a meat packing plant. Moss also promoted an idea he called Mossmain. This was a futuristic city he planned to build ten miles west of Billings. World War II intervened, and Preston Moss died in 1947, never realizing this dream. Melville, the Mosses’ middle daughter, was seven when her family moved into the mansion. She was a talented musician and played the harp, piano, and bass from an early age. Melville traveled the world and never married, but the mansion was her home throughout her life. She died in 1984 at eighty-two. Because of Melville’s good stewardship, the grand interiors remain unchanged today.

From More Montana Moments
P.S. Remember this Montana mansion?