The Touchstone Project: Saving Montana’s Small Town Heritage is a startup project to foster long-term stewardship for properties and communities that are severely threatened. In 2005-2006 MPA conducted field work with the ranching community of Birney, Montana to interview elders, scan historic photos and scrap books, copy old letters and record historic sites. From this collection, we created a digital archive, a written narrative of local history and a video of interviews. The project was highly successful, allowing Birneyites to tell their stories in their own words and ensuring that long-held photographs and letters, home movies and historic ranches were documented, keeping the history intact for now and for the future.
It is just this kind of on-the-ground work that MPA has conducted with Montana’s rural towns for almost a quarter of a century. As a small organization, we lend our professional assistance where it is most needed. We focus upon such communities knowing that our help in small towns makes an enormous impact.
MPA will now carry this model to five communities and begin a permanent outreach program to establish historic digital archives in communities throughout the state.
We have already begun work in Danvers, MT to save the historic St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church. With assistance from the JMKaplan Fund, Jerry Metcalf Foundation, Friends of St. Wenceslaus, Humanities Montana and support from the Great Falls-Billings Catholic Diocese, the church is being repainted, the foundation stabilized, and the windows repaired so that the history of St. Wenceslaus, Danvers, its families, and legacy in Montana history can be preserved in an onsite digital archive.
Steele-Reese and National Endowment for the Humanities support for The Touchstone Project will help us begin a program to put trained preservation experts and historians out into four rural Montana communities. We will begin this project with the communities of Sun River, Big Arm, Frenchtown and Fort Benton. Our exceptional resource people will provide on-site assistance to collect histories, digitize them, share them through the state’s online Montana Memory Project and train local folks hoping to safeguard their culture and find new uses for historic buildings.
Sun River where the community has rallied in recent years to save the Adams Stone Barn. Sun River is one of Montana’s earliest, most important ranching communities. The most active members of the Sun River Valley Historical Society are octogenarians valiantly working to preserve theircommunity and culture.
Fort Benton was the head of navigation on the Missouri River in the 1860s and 1870s, and in recent years the town restored a section of the fort, erected a statue to their historical mascot Shep the Dog and are working to revitalize their downtown. This is a community that is striving to hold on to their past and use it as their centerpiece. Our project will lend support to the efforts of local residents who are committed to keeping their heritage alive.
Big Arm School, located along Flathead Lake, is the heart of a small lakeside community with a long but unrecognized history. When threatened with demolition, the little community impressively rallied to save the one-room school as an interpretive community center. They now are working to open the school to the public and have summer events there. A repository for local history fits directly into their long term concept for the building and the town.
Frenchtown is one of Montana’s oldest towns. Settled by French Canadians, there is much early log architecture and a tremendous ethnic legacy. Recently, the local wood products mill, mainstay employer for decades, closed its doors. In the aftermath, we look to record the heritage before people move away and to help them turn the corner and look ahead to the community’s future.
The combined population of these communities totals roughly 1,400, with many more related but living elsewhere today. This project will benefit them, it will also provide advantages to others by setting a model that we plan to follow, and will seek to fund in future years. The focus will be to collect stories and preserve heritage collections, keep historic properties vital, and by extension offer new opportunities for small town businesses and tourism. Our project is a recipe to help struggling towns, encourage pride in community and possibilities for creating new experiences in historic buildings and venues.
MPA’s work is unglamorous. It’s a roll-up-the sleeves approach. We take time and focus on real people, go to where they live and help them preserve the legacy of their past. Over our 23-year history we have concentrated on those most in need -- from tiny, remote communities like Ingomar (population now less than 20) and Birney (population 108), to communities suffering economic setbacks like Alberton and Superior, to towns hard hit by daunting post-industrial challenges such as Libby and Butte. We also have strong relationships with many tribal communities and over the years have assisted their cultural efforts.
These communities know that historic preservation directly benefits communities, particularly when they are in danger of losing much knowledge in the decades to come. These are towns whose historical memories are now held by people well into their 80s, towns that are losing their center and where people are moving away. When communities save history, it enriches lives and contributes to the quality of life. And, by providing a new life for threatened buildings, it offers possibilities for heritage development in the future.
