Mercantile owner Forrest M. Mack and partner Alfred Strode built this remarkably well-preserved false-front commercial building in 1912 in the now-defunct town of Gilman, two miles east of Augusta. That year, the Great Northern Railway had founded Gilman as the western terminus of a branch line from Great Falls, bypassing Augusta and angering many residents of the already well-established community. Rather than move everything to Gilman, Augusta boosters resisted by lobbying both the railroad and legislators to extend the line to their town. Their efforts were ultimately successful, and the spur to Augusta was complete in 1922. Seeing that Gilman’s economic future was fading, Mack hired a mover to haul the building, in two parts, to this location in 1925. The store sold everything from fruits, vegetables, and meats to clothing, shoes, hardware, and toys. Under Mack’s community-minded direction, it became one of Main Street’s anchor businesses in both commercial and community life until his death in 1966. Designed to give young towns the look of instant prosperity, false-front commercial buildings were once ubiquitous in Montana. Such buildings were constructed in mountain mining towns, plains agricultural communities, and early railroad centers from the 1860s through the early years of the 1900s. With the arrival of local sawmills and, after 1883, railroad-shipped wood and glass building materials, business owners erected substantial wood-frame buildings that projected permanence and stability. Mack’s store, with its elegant, bracketed cornice, hand-painted signage, and full complement of tall display windows is an outstanding example of a once-common western architectural form.
]]>Two forges and an interior wood partition seared with the impressions of cattle brands manufactured on site attest to this property’s long history as a blacksmith shop. Canadian immigrant Treffle Bergeron opened (and likely built) the lot’s first smithy circa 1899. In 1913, Bergeron sold the property, and by 1916, blacksmith and mechanic Frank Quinn opened his long-running business. The next year, Quinn built this large building, which encompassed the original blacksmith shop; one portion of the original shop’s exterior walls remains intact within the seventy-five-by-one-hundred-foot garage. Quinn chose to build with cast concrete block. A popular construction material in the 1910s, cast concrete block was as fireproof as stone—important for a blacksmith shop—but much less expensive. Like many blacksmiths, Quinn’s business adapted to the era’s rapidly changing technology. While continuing to work as a blacksmith, Quinn expanded his services to meet the needs of local farmers and ranchers, repairing horse-drawn and motorized farm implements as well as automobiles. Tall roof trusses and oversized wooden swinging doors on the west elevation made it easier to accommodate oversized agricultural equipment. The entrepreneurial Quinn also sold radios, tires, and cars; he was a licensed dealer for Durant, Chalmers, and Chrysler automobiles. Active in Republican politics, Quinn hosted regular gatherings at the garage, from voter registration drives to post-county commission meeting socials. Quinn died in 1943. Five years later Richard Kenck purchased the property, where he worked as a welder and mechanic and maintained an International Harvester dealership until his retirement in 1975.
]]>Generations of native peoples used this crossing in their seasonal travels to the Great Plains to hunt buffalo. Lewis and Clark christened the river after Secretary of War Henry Dearborn on their trek through the area in 1805, but its location in Blackfeet country left the valley long unexplored by whites. U.S. Army topographer P. M. Engel passed through in 1859 scouting the route for John Mullan’s military road. He described the remote timbered valley as difficult to maneuver, “…cut up by a great many sloughs and ditches.” Homesteaders later began to settle in the area with the completion of the Montana Central Railroad in 1887. Augusta, strategically located between Helena and Great Falls, became the local trading center. The Dearborn River High Bridge, built in 1897, provided critical access for homesteaders to the railroad in Augusta and Wolf Creek. Until the early 1930s, local farmers and ranchers transported goods and livestock across this bridge. This structure is the last surviving example of a pin-connected Pratt half-deck truss bridge in the United States. The design is unusual because the deck attaches midway on the trusses instead of at the bottom or top. The King Bridge Company of Cleveland, Ohio, tailored the design specifically to the Dearborn River Canyon to carry relatively light loads over the deep crossing. Lewis and Clark County and the Montana Department of Transportation restored the landmark bridge in 2003.
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