Help Us Document and Share Your Community History

 ICYMI--or looked at it a while back but then forgot about the site--I want to remind you about the existence of Historic Montana, a great resource for community study. The website and companion app, originally launched in 2017, started out with about 250 properties. Over the 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 learn about architecture; social, economic, and cultural life; and significant events and movements in Montana and national history as they relate to specific Montana places. 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. You can even use the text and photos to create your own walking tours. 

We also invite you and your students to help shape history by making HistoricMT.org even better! If you have a class assignment that asks students to

• photograph National Register-listed buildings or districts to document your community,
• conduct new research on a National Register-listed site (or buildings that contribute to an NR district), or
• record interviews or podcast episodes about places in your town

we would love to feature it on HistoricMT.org. For more information on ways to use and improve Historic Montana, contact MHS Interpretive Historian Christine Brown at 406-444-1687 or Christine.brown@mt.gov.

 

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.

Exploring the History of Montana's One-Room Schools

I came across this article on one-room schools (on Facebook, of course)--recently published in the Bozeman Chronicle. Larry Cebula, a professor who teaches public history at Eastern Washington University, commented on my friend's post. He mentioned a project he assigned one of his students: to map all the schools in Spokane County in 1927. The densely populated map provides a graphic representation that "reminds of us of the pervasiveness of this vanished institution." I was immediately enamored.

Check out Larry's student's map and then tell me if you think a similar project could be completed by high school students. Your County Superintendent of Schools should have a list of all the one-room schools in your county--and likely additional information as well (for example, how many books were in the libraries, what the school terms were, how much the teacher was paid, etc.) We have some of those records in the Montana Historical Society Archives as well. 

Another great resource is Charlotte Caldwell's beautiful photographic history, Visions and Voices: Montana's One-Room Schoolhouses.  100% of the net profits from the sale of this book go directly to the Preserve Montana Fund for the stabilization and preservation of Montana’s Historic One-Room Schoolhouses.

And speaking of ... Montana Preservation Alliance is working to document and preserve remaining one and two-room schools (active and inactive). You can share information about schools that are still standing here. 

I ran this project by Corvallis teacher Phil Leonardi to ask him what he thought--and what other sources he'd recommend a teacher using if s/he decided to take this on. Here's what he wrote: "Wow! I really like this but it doesn’t need to even be ‘ancient history” considering all of the consolidation taking place in Montana.  I like the idea of County Supts as a starting point…." He also recommended checking with your local historical society. "They usually have the photos needed which you need to really generate interest and recognition. ... Here’s another resource…. Nostalgia of old yearbooks.  What I’ve found is that there always seems to be a class in the last 70 years that will dedicate a section of their yearbook to “yester year” and school history…. generally around 1950-1960 since they are now recalling the educational experience of their parents from the 1920’s and 1930’s from the generation before consolidation or many of Montana’s rural schools." County history books almost always have sections on school histories too. (You can find these in your community--and many have been digitized by the Montana Memory Project.) Finally, make sure to check the National Register of Historic Places: many school buildings are listed.   

If anyone ends of trying this, let me know (mkohl@mt.gov) and I'll see what I can do to help! It would take time and work, but what a gift of scholarship a classroom project on one-room schoolhouses would be!

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."

Crowdsourcing Projects: Allowing Students to Make Genuine Contributions While Learning History, Research and Writing

Crowdsourcing (“the practice of obtaining needed … content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an online community”) seems to me to offer great opportunities for classroom teachers—particularly high school teachers because they can provide students with an authentic audience and a real purpose for conducting research and writing. Participating in crowd-sourcing projects allows students to make actual contributions to preserving knowledge.

Here are three good examples—all of which seem to me to provide great opportunities to engage Montana students.

National Museum of American History’s National Agricultural Innovation and Heritage Archive

This new project is designed to document the transformation of American agriculture over the past seventy years. Recognizing that “personal stories are key in telling the story of agricultural innovation,” “the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History is asking the public to help us preserve the innovations and experiences of farming and ranching across the United States.” Thus far, curator Peter Liebhold has collected 40 stories, including ones from Illinois (participating in soil conservation NoTill projects in the 1980s). Hawaii (cowboying in the 1960s), Iowa (plowing with horses in the 1930s) and California (the spinach crisis of 2006). They have instructions on how to participate and plan on adding specific ideas for teachers down the road.

The Living New Deal

 This is a very cool website created by members of the University of California Geography Department to document the ongoing impact of the New Deal. As they explain:

No city, town, or rural area was untouched by the New Deal.  Hundreds of thousands of roads, schools, theaters, libraries, hospitals, post offices, courthouses, airports, parks, forests, gardens, and artworks—created in only one decade by our parents and grandparents—are still in use today. Because these public works were rarely marked, the New Deal’s ongoing contribution to American life goes largely unseen. Given the New Deal’s scale and impact across America, it seems inconceivable that no national register exists of what the New Deal built.  The Living New Deal is making visible that enduring legacy.

The project is great—but Montana is woefully underrepresented with only 9 sites. Luckily, they are looking for volunteers to add information. “In order to identify New Deal public works, we are asking volunteers from historical societies, libraries or any walk of life to help provide information. If you know of a New Deal project in your community, please take the time to photograph and document it. Then send the information to us for inclusion in the New Deal inventory. For tips on being a New Deal sleuth, download our Guidelines for Researchers.” You can find out more about how to get involved in this documentation project here.

Story Project: Celebrating Montana Women as Community Builders 

Looking for something closer to home? This project is part of a larger project to create a new mural for the Montana State Capitol Building--the first in over 80 years. Initiated by the 2011 Montana Legislature with Senate Bill 59 and supported by private donations, the mural will honor the history of Montana women as community builders. It will be installed in November 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of woman suffrage in Montana.    

 

The Story Project is designed to extend the commemoration’s reach, to raise awareness about the centennial of woman suffrage in Montana, to recognize Montana women’s contributions to the state and their communities, and to celebrate the creation of the Montana Women's Mural in the State Capitol.

How will it work?
The Story Project is inviting people across Montana to collect stories about individual women and women's organizations who have helped shape our communities and state, past and present. At the completion of The Story Project (November 2014, the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage), stories and photographs donated to the project will be offered to the Archives of the Montana Historical Society for use by future generations of researchers.

What types of stories is The Story Project looking for?
According to its website, The Story Project “welcomes stories about a woman or group of women whose type of contributions and achievements will help the artist painting the Montana Women's Mural envision how Montana women built our social institutions: libraries, museums, theaters, parks, playgrounds, schools, shelters, hospitals, labor unions, and social clubs.”

The Story Project has developed a questionnaire to guide participants’ research and storytelling, as well as forms you’ll need to submit information.

If anyone decides to participate in these (or other) crowdsourcing projects, I’d love to hear about your experience—and that of your students.

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.