Property owner Hattie Haight hosted the Immanuel Mission of the First Baptist Church in this modest home from 1891 to 1893, catering to the neighborhood’s multi-ethnic, working-class residents. Widowed in 1894, Hattie retained the home as a rental,…

Children first attended school in a log cabin at this site in 1882, the year the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its line through the Yellowstone Valley. The railroad brought growing numbers of homesteaders, and in 1904 the community replaced…

Twenty-year-old Herman K. Anderson arrived in the United States in the late 1880s. One of over 1.5 million Swedes who left their homeland between 1850 and 1930, he quickly found work in North Dakota and eastern Montana on the Northern Pacific…

Marysville’s Methodist Episcopal Church was built in 1886 by its congregation on land purchased from Thomas Cruse, who founded the town in 1876 around his Drum Lummon gold and silver claims. The church’s modest clapboard-sided frame and bell tower…

The 1887 Dawes Act gave Congress the power to survey Indian reservations, assign land (allotments) to individual Indians, and open the remaining land to homesteaders. Although tribal leaders, including Chief Charlo and Sam Resurrection, resisted…

A full-length front porch welcomed visitors to the clapboard home constructed on this lot in 1904. Robert and Edith Cooley purchased the residence from Golden Rule bookkeeper R. A. Black the following year. The couple had moved to Bozeman in 1899…

Fort Benton’s first school opened in 1868, over twenty years before statehood. As Montana’s population grew, so did its commitment to education, fueled by the belief that a successful democracy demands an educated populace. Upon statehood (1889),…

Construction layers of this original homestead tell much of Nevada City’s “boom and bust” history. In 1864, miner Frank Finney and his bride, Mary, moved into a cabin on this property that had been constructed the previous year. The cabin forms the…