Norwegian-American Lutherans settling in the Flathead Valley in the late 1880s organized the area’s first Lutheran congregation in 1895. Organizational meetings were held in Christian and Mathilde Presbye’s home, and the first church was constructed…

An 1868 lithograph drawn by artist Alfred Mathews shows a large commercial structure on this lot, but panoramic mapmaker E. L. Sheldon depicted the entire block occupied by single-family dwellings in 1875. Carpenter Gothic style trim originally…

Virginia City witnessed Montana’s first Methodist services in 1864. By 1874, however, too many residents had succumbed to “depraved and wicked conditions.” Well-known itinerant ministers Revs. W. W. Van Orsdel and T. C. Iliff, then resident pastors…

A steeply pitched roof and windows with pointed arches reveal Gothic Revival style influence in this finely-crafted 1884 residence, built by George Thexton. The style, often adapted to the frontier in wood, is here expressed in stone as was the norm…

With its four-story tower, strict symmetry, Gothic-arched front entry, decorative symbolic pendants, and tall narrow windows, McMullen Hall references the Collegiate Gothic style. First employed by Ivy League schools emulating the architecture of…

The first circuit-riding Methodist ministers, “the Lord’s Horsemen,” arrived in Montana in the 1870s to establish congregations among the territory’s early population. Settlers came to the Flathead when reservation lands opened to homesteading in…

The Dokken-Nelson Funeral Home business commissioned this building from Bozeman’s prolific early twentieth century architect, Fred F. Willson, and it is indicative of Willson’s diversity of styles. Upon the building’s completion in 1936, Hermann…

In 1865, Christopher Higgins, Francis Worden, and David Pattee constructed grist and lumber mills near where the Mullan Road (now Front Street) intersected with present day Higgins Avenue. Worden’s 1874 Carpenter Gothic home on East Pine, once a…

Dismayed that his son’s adoptive home had no Catholic Church, Frenchman Achille Wibaux instructed Pierre to build one here. The rancher contributed $2,000 for the construction of this wood-frame, vernacular Gothic Revival structure. It was built in…

The settlement of Big Timber coincided with the advent of the Northern Pacific Railroad, which steamed into the Yellowstone Valley in 1882, spurring settlement along the line. In 1884, Rev. Alfred Brown, an Episcopal minister from Livingston, held…