One Giant Leap for MPA

Major New Grants Help Transform MPA’s Most Endangered Places Program

Leap Year looks to be a lucky one for MPA, starting with the great news in January that the J.M. Kaplan Fund awarded us $75,000 to fund brick and mortar grants to preserve Montana’s historic industrial architecture.

And then, to add to our amazing fortune, more exciting news came in early February with word from the National Trust for Historic Preservation that MPA will receive a $150,000 Partners in the Field challenge grant to expand our Most Endangered Places program. Together, these funds, along with matching funds from private donors and friends like the Montana History Foundation, will allow MPA to hire dedicated field staff, better respond to imminent preservation threats across Montana, and help fund the preservation of some of Montana’s most important buildings and structures. 

Since 2001, MPA has worked to save and protect Montana buildings and places from demolition, neglect, or destructive development through our Montana’s Most Endangered Places program. But for most of the past 5 years MPA has had a tiny staff and a shoestring budget with which to reach out and assist with threatened historic places. Although we have had a proven track record of saving properties put on our Most Endangered Places list, our ability to respond quickly and affect change has been limited.

Now, MPA will create a new stand alone Most Endangered Places program, with a new full-time director. Through this expanded program we will actively work across the state to seek out highly-significant properties, create awareness of threatened properties, and actively pursue stabilization and repair options.

The Partners in the Field grant from the National Trust dovetails perfectly with the Kaplan grant. “The timing could not have been better,” says Chere Jiusto, MPA Executive Director. “The National Trust grant will allow MPA to have a dedicated person in the field, responding immediately to calls for help with threatened historic properties across Montana. And now, with the Kaplan Foundation grant funds we can offer funding to help owners and communities with threatened industrial buildings think more about rescuing properties than demolishing them. These two grants will transform our ability to help preserve and protect Montana’s historic architecture.”

The Kaplan grant funds will help save some of our hardest-to-rescue resources. Across the nation, industrial properties rank among the most iconic but overlooked collections of historic architecture. Montana has some of the country’s best preserved, most authentic mining and agricultural industrial architecture, reflecting American traditions of work and ingenuity. Today, most of these are highly threatened historic resources, such as grain elevators, mine yards, breweries, foundries, railroad depots, and industrial kilns that centered communities and provided the economic engines to stability. With funds to stabilize these sometimes obsolete buildings and structures, these icons of industry can be rehabilitated, reused, or can continue as tangible monuments to our past economy.

The new Montana’s Most Endangered Places program is scheduled to get underway in Spring 2008 with a dedicated field director, and requests for letters of inquiry for grants for industrial architecture will be announced in early Summer 2008.

To put your name on the contact list for job and grant announcements, e-mail info@preservemontana.org

Ken Lustbader (left), grant consultant at the J.M. Kaplan Fund with Butte’s planning director, Jon Sesso at the Kelley Mine. Sesso recently gave Lustbader and MPA director Chere Jiusto a tour of some of Butte’s most impressive historic industrial sites.