It's the championship!

 

Voting Ends April 5

Two Central Montana powerhouses are squaring off in the Montana Madness championship, each vying to be named Montana’s BEST Best Place: Fort Benton and First Peoples Buffalo Jump.

Fort Benton National Historic Landmark had a relatively easy road through Montana Madness, a tournament created by the Montana Historical Society. Fort Benton dominated the Bearcreek—the site of Montana’s largest coal mining disaster in the Sweet 16—and won handily against Lewis and Clark Caverns in the Elite 8. In the Final Four, it beat the powerhouse Going to the Sun Road by 82 votes.

First Peoples Buffalo Jump started the tournament well, taking out its neighbor, C. M. Russell’s Home and Studio, by almost 300 votes. It dominated Grant Kohrs Ranch in the Elite Eight but barely squeaked out a win over Pictograph Cave in the Final Four. Only nine votes separated the two ancient Indigenous sites.

Now, First Peoples and Fort Benton—both National Historic Landmarks—square off in the championship.

First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park, a communal bison kill site, is one of the oldest and most intact bison jumps in North America. Before acquiring horses in the 1700s, Indigenous peoples living on the northern plains hunted in groups, on foot. They took advantage of the terrain around them—including areas they turned into “buffalo jumps”—to help them harvest the bison on which they depended for survival.

Founded in 1846 as the fur trade transitioned from beaver pelts to buffalo robes, Fort Benton calls itself the Birthplace of Montana. It served as a trading post, military fort, and center for the distribution of Indian annuities. It was also the head of navigation on the Missouri River, where the first steamboat arrived in 1860. Fort Benton remained the region’s unchallenged freighting and transportation hub until transcontinental railroads reached Montana in the early 1880s and ended steamboat travel.

Everyone can participate in choosing the winner of this exciting contest. To cast your ballot, simply visit https://mhs.mt.gov/education/Montana-Madness-2026.

P.S. Did you play Montana Madness (or any variation of March Madness) with your students? How'd it go? Who/what/where's the champion?

New Resource for Community Study

I'm excited to introduce Historic Montana, a new resource for community use and study--and also to ask for your help!

We need PICTURES from towns across Montana of historic places listed in the National Register and interpreted with a National Register sign. This would be a great project for a photography class, Montana history class, or school club. Learn more in this guest post, written by my colleague Christine Brown:

Did you know that Montana Historical Society historians have written more than 1,700 National Register of Historic Places signs? You can read the signs one by one as you travel across the state, or you can learn about and see pictures of all these historic properties in one place on the Historic Montana website and companion app.

 The website and app, originally launched in 2017 as ExploreBig, started out with about 250 properties, and over the last three years, MHS historians have added over one thousand more historical narratives, thousands of “then and now” photos, and numerous new historic district and themed tours. Historic Montana users will learn about architecture; social, economic, and cultural life; and significant events and movements in Montana and national history as they relate to a specific Montana place. With so much information and a variety of historic and contemporary photographs, Historic Montana is a valuable resource for teachers and students working on place-based Montana history projects.

 Populating the website and app with a variety of photos is an ongoing project. Teachers and students are invited to help make Historic Montana better by submitting contemporary (or historic) photographs of the properties in your community that have a National Register sign posted. Participants will have their historic property photos published (with credit!) on Historic Montana. Email christine.brown@mt.gov or call 406-444-1687 for details.

Explore Big

My colleagues at the Montana Historical Society have been working hard--and that work has paid off. We are proud to present ExploreBig, a website and mobile app which supports the discovery of the built environment related to Montana history.

The website and mobile app draw on information from over 1500 sites in Montana with historic markers. Marker text is illustrated with images, while sites or regions are marked on a responsive map.

Although many sites in Montana are of historic or architectural significance, the sites marked with a historical marker have been fully researched, nominated for inclusion on the National Register, and physically marked with a descriptive sign. These historical markers become a story on ExploreBig which is linked by a tour to other stories.

Development of tours involves reviewing the National Register form for each story, illustrating the stories with relevant photographs, and marking the site’s coordinates on a GIS-supported map. The digitized historical photographs, maps, brochures, or drawings demonstrate the change of an environment and expand understanding of a place, while the map directs travelers to the site or in special cases a nearby city. The result is a website and a mobile app which allows you to effectively explore the built environment on a walking, driving, or armchair tour of the state.

In this first phase of website development, the MHS is connecting travelers to the broad themes which connect the disparate regions of the state. Early Montana, Mining, Railroads, Homesteading, and Tourism are just a few of the big themes in Montana history for which a tour is being developed.  

The marker text was developed by the Montana National Register Sign Program, which is funded through an allocated portion of the Montana Accommodations Tax (“bed” tax).

(1)    EASY TO USE AND FREE

The URL for ExploreBig is explorebig.org and the mobile app is available for Android and iOS devices through Google Play and the Apple App Store.

In keeping with the mission of the MHS to provide access to Montana's historical resources, the site is free to Internet users worldwide. No fees or subscriptions are required.

(2)    COMMUNITY CONTRIBUTIONSThe Montana Historical Society will continue to add thematic tours to the site in order to link the broad themes of the state’s history. In the next phase of project development, local organizations—museums, libraries, historical societies—will be invited to contribute digitized images for districts and buildings in order to expand tours for local audiences. Interested organizations may check our community contribution guide at http://mhs.mt.gov/research/online/explorebig or contact mhsdigital@mt.gov to share ideas or information about the resource.

Field trip on the cheap: Explore your neighborhood

Springtime is field trip time! This year, consider exploring the historic areas of your own community.

Historical walking tours of varying quality are available for the following communities: 

Billings, Biking Bozeman's Boundaries, Butte, Carbon County Driving Tour, Deer Lodge Main Street, Forsyth, Great Falls Rivers Edge Tour, Great Falls Railroad District Tour, Hamilton, Hardin, Havre Residential & Business District, Helena, Helena West Main Street, Helena's West Side Neighborhood, Historical Walking Tour of Kalispell, Laurel
Lewistown, Livingston Historic District, Miles City, Missoula, Missoula Riverfront Trail, Nevada City, Red Lodge, Virginia City, and Whitefish.

For our Women's History Matters project last year, Ellen Baumler created women's history themed walking tours for Helena, Butte's Red Light district, and Virginia City. Dick Gibson placed a Butte women's history tour on HistoryPin--as well as several other Butte virtual tours. We also digitized an older tour created for Bozeman's women's history sites and one for women's history sites on the University of Montana campus. 

Don't see your town on the list? Consider working with your students to make their own tour, using National Register information (you can find out what properties have been listed in the register here), Digital Sanborn maps (contact mkohl@mt.gov for the username and password), historic photographs, community history books (some of which have been digitized here), National Register sign texts, and oral histories. "Investigating a Historic Building" provides a good starting point for this type of assignment as does this Guide to Researching Your Historic Property.

Want to take it one step further? Richard Byrne at Free Technology for Teachers suggests resources you can use to have students record oral histories about places, and then link those places to a map in "Recording & Mapping Local History - Project Idea."

If you have access to historical photos of your town (and especially if you have a local historian who will help you pull this together) consider creating a "Then and Now" tour--using photocopies of historical photos for the "Then" and taking students to the spots shown in those photographs for the "Now." It is a great way to start a conversation about what has changed and what has remained the same. Ellen Baumler created a tour like this for Helena, which she calls "Camp to Capitol." It's a great model for anyone wanting to create something similar for their own communities. Anyone traveling to Helena can download this booklet--and, if she's available Ellen's happy to give group Camp to Capitol tours (contact ebaumler@mt.gov to check her availability.) 

If you do have students explore local sites, consider deputizing them as Community Historical Tour Guides. For many years, some Helena third grade teachers took their students on Camp to Capitol tours, and then required students to take an adult on a tour of three historic spots. The adult completed a tour guide evaluation form, which the students returned to school in order to become "Official Historic Tour Guides." Sometimes the mayor would hand out badges--other years the principal oversaw a simple ceremony--but either way, the kids loved it and took real pride in their new status as purveyors of local history.

You can find more resources for studying your community history and built environment on the Educator Page for Chapter 14 of Montana: Stories of the Land: "Towns Have Lives Too."

National Register Nominations--Valuable Sources of Information

I started the Montana History and Heritage Listserv long before this blog, whose purpose is to save the information disseminated through the listserv for posterity.

The listserv is on hiatus for the summer, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to take some of the most informative of earlier listserv postings and repost them here. Below is one from November 2011.

Do you have your students engage in local history research? If so, you might want to look at one of the newest digital collections added to the Montana Memory Project,  Montana on the National Register of Historic Places. The collection can be found at http://mtmemory.org/cdm4/browse.php?CISOROOT=%2Fp103401coll12. (Or go to the Montana Memory home page, http://www.mtmemory.org/, choose “browse,” select “Montana on the National Register of Historic Places” from the drop down box on the upper left, then press “go.”)

Some background is probably in order. The National Register of Historic Places is the nation's official list of those cultural resources deemed worthy of preservation. To become listed in the National Register, properties or historic districts, which contain many properties (for example, the Deer Lodge Central Business Historic District) go through a very thorough review process. That means that to nominate a property, the person preparing the nomination has to gather a ton of historical, biographical, and architectural research.

That research is compiled in the nomination. Since the research is actually useful for lots of different purposes (not just for the purpose for which it was gathered) these nominations are incredibly valuable (and generally overlooked) sources of information about Montana’s communities and their development.

There are over 1,000 Montana properties/districts listed in the National Register—each one of which has a nomination (You can find a list of NR properties here: http://mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/NationalReg/NRMap.aspx.) Hard copies of the nominations reside at the State Historic Preservation Office and (often) in local community libraries, historical societies, or preservation offices. Now, for 89 National Register-listed properties or historic districts (including most of those that were nominated between 2006 and 2010), the NR nominations are also available online through the Montana Memory Project in the Montana on the National Register of Historic Places collection.

The nominations in Montana Memory are full text searchable—so, you can search the collection using people’s names, business names, or key words (e.g., Finnish).  The collection is organized alphabetically by property name (“Alice Creek Trail Historic District” through “Wold-Cue Barn”) but you can sort the nominations by county and town as well.

Mining NR nominations for historical information takes a little practice. The first couple of pages are specific to their purpose as National Register nominations. The good stuff is further down. Interested in architecture? Then you will want to read Section 7—but for most of you, the most useful section will likely be Section 8 (which is where the history is). (Note that the forms have a small space for these sections—you will need to dig further in for the continuation sheets, which is where the meat is.)

Take for example the Kero Farmstead in Carbon County. Section 8 of this nomination includes background on Crow occupation of this territory, Jacob Kero, who homesteaded the farm, the history of homesteading in the area, the history of the Finnish settlement in the area, and information about Finnish architecture. Section 9 includes an extensive bibliography.

If you’ve read this far, congratulations on making it through an extraordinarily long post. I hope it peaked your curiosity and you will spend some time browsing this important digital collection. If you like local history, you’ll be glad  you did.

Happy browsing.