Beginning with gold strikes in the 1860s and continuing through the homestead years into the 1920s, Montanans built more than 2,600 rural schoolhouses. Settlers squatting on Crow lands in the Fishtail Basin near present-day Dean began educating…

The masonry buildings in the heart of Walkerville reflect the town’s nineteenth-century silver-mining roots. Mining investors, the Walker Brothers of Salt Lake, and future copper king Marcus Daly began developing silver mines here in 1876. Joseph…

Montana Avenue was a wagon trail when the first students trekked across treeless pastures to class in 1888. The bell rang out over the valley promptly at 8:40 AM, letting children know that they had better not dawdle and were expected at their desks…

Built in 1901, Billings’ fourth school had six classrooms and an auditorium. A third-floor gymnasium, the first in the city, was added a year later. By 1906, 340 children attended Garfield School. The homesteading boom, the growth of sugar…

Expansion of the campus in 1923 included the construction of this large building to house classrooms and laboratories for ore dressing, metallurgical research, ceramics, and chemistry. Architects Floyd Hamill of Butte and George Carsley, widely…

Locals initiated their town’s most ambitious school modernization effort in June 1938. Despite the still-lingering effects of the Great Depression, they voted overwhelmingly to support dramatic improvements to Bozeman’s public schools. Workers…

With schools “crowded to suffocation,” the Billings School District decided to construct a new four-room school on the city’s West Side in 1909 for an estimated $28,000. For the building’s design, Billings architect Curtis Oehme chose a practical…

The opening of the Crow Indian Reservation to homesteaders brought settlers to this area who founded the town of Absarokee in 1893. School District #52 was created and by 1903, a log cabin with a potbelly stove served the town’s first children. In…

William A. O’Brien, architect of the Leonard Apartments and the Kelly and Hennessy mansions, designed this handsome building of brown brick veneer in 1919. In 1920, the offices of District #1 moved from their longtime quarters at Butte High School…

Butte School District #1 constructed this attractive four-story building between 1918 and 1920 to house the high school’s Manual Training Department. The United States Army Recruiting Center was located here during World War II and, later, from 1954…