In 1885, commissioners replaced the county’s first eighteen-bed “poor farm” hospital (1871) with a two-story, one-hundred-bed brick hospital. Although county inspectors generally found the “inmates” comfortable and well-cared-for, they sometimes pointed to problems such as the septic system backing into the well, straw-filled mattresses lacking sheets, and poor-quality food. After 1935 earthquakes destroyed the brick hospital, the county rebuilt it with an $80,000 bond and federal Public Works Administration funds. Prominent Billings architect John G. Link and Helena architect Edwin B. Benson designed the Late Art Deco/Early Moderne building, which opened in 1939. Decorative tiles and the central entry’s vertical emphasis reflect 1920s Art Deco influences, while the building’s horizonal massing, sleek lines, and smooth stucco walls evoke the 1930s Early Moderne style. Residents passed time playing cards, resting, reading donated books and magazines, tending gardens and livestock, and watching community programs. Staff cooked meals, washed laundry, and provided medical care. Many residents lived here until their deaths; others left periodically, but often returned. By 1961, the average patient’s age was 81, and the hospital officially became a convalescent home.
]]>Swedish miner Benjamin Benson and his German wife Anna lived in this gable-front-and-wing cottage for more than fifty years. The home—built in stages beginning circa 1875—was constructed of log and stone and likely clad with stucco after Helena’s 1935 earthquakes. In 1866, Benjamin (age twenty-one) moved to Helena in search of gold. He settled along the south end of Last Chance Gulch and claimed government mineral lodes in partnership with his West Main Street neighbors. After several years spent developing placer mines, Benson and his partners had built an extensive water system for processing the ore, which they repurposed and expanded into the New Water Company in 1872. The company provided fresh water to the south and west sides of Helena and helped extinguish fires of the sort that had already destroyed large swaths of Helena in its formative years. Ben and Anna raised three children in the home, and Ben was active in local Republican politics. He and Anna died five months apart in 1931, and neighbor Thomas Nagle purchased the home.
]]>Nestled in the pine forest north of Rimini, the Wetzstein/Tipton Ranch buildings remain an outstanding example of a World War II-era Rustic style ranch. With their young daughter Mary Ellen, William and Clara Wetzstein left Mandan, North Dakota, in the early 1930s to pursue their dream of owning a ranch. They lived in Helena initially while William supported the family by working as a boilermaker for the Northern Pacific Railroad. In 1941, the Wetzsteins purchased Fred Irwin’s homestead property. With help from neighbor Fred Schwarzhans and his draft horse Old Pete, they harvested trees in Lazyman Gulch and hauled them nearly four miles to the ranch. Once the trees dried, William—a skilled carpenter—and Clara peeled the bark, saddle notched the ends, and local brothers George and Leo Sawallisch helped them stack and chink the walls. During the next seven years, William and Clara built the main ranch house, a barn, outhouse, milkhouse/utility shed, chicken house, and two garages. Mary Ellen and her husband Walter Tipton built the summer cabin. To achieve a distinctive, rustic aesthetic the Wetzstein’s painted each building red, and all the chinking, trim, and rafter and log ends white. The couple raised goats, pigs, chickens, and a variety of fruits and vegetables for home consumption. They also sold and traded milk, cheese, and eggs. William retired in 1953 but continued ranching until 1965. After the Wetzsteins died in the mid-1980s, Mary Ellen, her son Michael and daughter Diane, lovingly maintained the ranch.
]]>In 1871, Lewis and Clark County purchased 160 acres two miles north of Helena to create a residential facility for the homeless, infirm, and out of work. The original “poor farm” facilities accommodated eighteen “inmates,” but a new building, constructed in 1885, housed approximately one hundred. The complex also included a superintendent’s residence (1891), a detention hospital (1901), a garden, and a nearly two-acre cemetery. The residents, almost exclusively male and often foreign-born, suffered from such afflictions as alcoholism, tuberculosis, fractures, epilepsy, syphilis, rheumatism, dementia, and eye infections. Women passed through a few times a month, usually to give birth. Although work requirements faded by the 1920s, patients were still encouraged to perform “light labor” in the twelve-acre vegetable gardens and wheat fields. Stays ranged from weeks to decades. For forty-one years (1920-1961), county physician Sid Cooney tended to patients’ daily medical needs. In 1935, a magnitude 6.25 earthquake destroyed the main hospital building, forcing residents to evacuate first to a temporary camp at the fairgrounds, then to St. Peter’s Hospital. Four years later, the Late Deco/Early Moderne style building opened, complete with a surgery room and maternity ward. A reporter visiting the complex in 1944 described it as a “community of persons” who lived “not in squalor or poverty. . .but in clean, comfortable and wholesome surroundings with friendly companionship.” In its final decades, the hospital served mostly elderly residents; in 1961, it formally transitioned to the Cooney Convalescent Home.
]]>Minneapolis architects William Purcell and George Elmslie designed this Prairie style residence for Louis and Caroline Heitman in 1916. Before moving to Minneapolis, Purcell and Elmslie worked with renowned Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. In their quest to create a thoroughly American architectural style, Wright and Sullivan embraced organic themes found in nature. Purcell and Elmslie clearly distinguished their work from Wright’s, adapting the Prairie style for Montana by specifying a steep front-gabled roof to shed snow and vertical redwood siding to fit the natural environment. Inside, classic Prairie style hallmarks include the colorful leaded glass windows, exposed wood ceiling beams, and a two-sided Roman brick fireplace. Louis Heitman, one of Montana’s foremost stock growers and investors, operated Helena’s American National Bank. In 1931, J. E. “Eddy” and Eve O’Connell purchased the home. Eddy owned Eddy’s Bakery, a commercial bread company. The O’Connell’s donated much of their fortune to fund college scholarships and improve nearby Carroll College. Their only son Jim and his wife Merle perpetuated the family’s business and charitable work and the home remained in the family until 2017.
]]>Fred and Emma Gamer built this vernacular (builder-designed) home in 1874. The home’s style and character evolved to suit the needs of its owners. In 1877, they built an addition to accommodate their growing family. The Gamers sold boots and shoes in Helena, Butte, and Anaconda. As their business prospered, they constructed the Gamer Block on Last Chance Gulch and purchased a ranch in the Helena valley. Emma helped found the Montana chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), an organization that promoted women’s suffrage and sobriety. Fred managed the business and served as trustee for Montana Wesleyan University. The Gamers filed for bankruptcy in 1898, forcing the sale of the ranch and the Gamer Block. Their son Fred, Jr. purchased the Butte and Anaconda shoe stores. Fred Sr. died in January 1911, but Emma remained in residence until 1933 when Lena Cullum purchased the home. Cullum served as superintendent of the Florence Crittenton Home, a charitable home and hospital for unwed mothers. She lived at the Florence Crittenden Home and this house became a rental property.
]]>Helena’s population grew from 3,624 in 1880 to 13,834 in 1890. The demand for housing grew apace. Between 1888, when the city annexed the Cox Addition, and the early 1900s, forty, mostly working-class homes were built in the South Hills, including this vernacular wood-frame residence. Norwegian brothers Martin and Peter Gabriel may have built the house in 1889 on land originally owned by William Ganson who lived next door at 556. Martin (an upholsterer for A. P. Curtin) had married Marie Fremming in 1888. Peter (a clerk for Clarke, Conrad and Curtin, a large furniture and hardware dealer) married Marie’s younger sister Elizabeth in February 1890. Their son was born that March, and Peter died in November. The Gabriels remained here until 1892. German-born barber Ferdinand Christiansen and his wife Melinda purchased the house in 1906. Melinda divorced Ferdinand in 1914. In 1920, she lived here with five of their six children, ages twenty-nine to fourteen. Four of the children worked to support the family, as a gasoline salesman, machinist, barber, and candy factory apprentice. Melinda remained in residence until her death in 1938.
]]>The need to serve World War I’s returning Veterans led the Veterans Bureau to expand its services in the 1920s and 1930s. However, by the early 1930s, Fort Harrison’s hospital (Building #2) was overcrowded and antiquated. In 1932, the Veterans Administration (VA) completed a new 165-bed brick hospital on the site of the former enlisted men's barracks. Designed in the Colonial Revival style, the stately building features a projecting central bay with arched entryways, a pedimented roof, and keystone arches above the windows. Most of the building materials were locally sourced. Kain Granite Company in Clancy cut the granite for the foundation and windowsills, Helena’s Western Clay Manufacturing Company provided fifty train carloads of brick, and Helena Sand and Gravel supplied the concrete. Devastating earthquakes struck Helena in October 1935, damaging the hospital and heating plant. Patients and staff returned in February 1937. Following World War II and the Korean Conflict, the VA built yet another new hospital nearby in 1963. They remodeled this building in 1964. Since then, it has served as administrative offices for the VA and medical staff.
]]>Historic military forts across the United States differ greatly, but most share a common landscape feature—the parade ground—where soldiers practiced military drills, held ceremonies, and gathered for recreation. Fort Harrison’s parade ground has changed little since 1895. Using standardized plans, contractors created a rectangular 1000-foot-by-400-foot parade ground with triangular end points. In 1896, Companies B, D, and E of the 22nd Infantry installed a flagpole and cannon near the center of the parade ground. African American soldiers of the 24th Infantry Regiment, who had served with distinction during the 1899-1902 Philippine-American War, completed landscaping the parade grounds and residential areas in 1903. Cottonwood, mountain ash, and spruce trees, purchased from the State Nursery Company, were the same species as those planted at the nearby Broadwater Hotel and Natatorium. After World War I, the grounds served as recreation space for hospital patients and staff. Over a century later, new buildings to the north have changed the parade ground’s shape, but the lawn and many mature trees planted by past soldiers still reflect the fort’s early days.
]]>In the 1870s, the U.S. Army dotted the territory with forts as it worked with brutal efficiency to confine Indians to reservations. With that mission well underway by the 1880s, it closed most of its nine Montana forts and decided to consolidate operations at a new location. Eager to benefit economically, Helena businessmen campaigned for the new headquarters, pointing to the capital city’s strategic location on two transcontinental rail lines and the valley’s healthy climate. The fact that President Benjamin Harrison’s son Russell lived in Helena may have helped their cause. In 1892, Congress authorized $300,000 to build the fort at Helena. Construction began in 1894; Nicholas Kessler’s nearby brickyard likely supplied the brick. Architect C. S. Johnson designed the “plain but substantially built” buildings using standard army plans and situated them facing a central parade ground. The rectilinear buildings reflected the Army’s preference for order and symmetry, and the residences’ sizes and detailing reflected their occupants’ ranks. African American soldiers with the Twenty-fourth Infantry returned to the fort after serving with distinction in the Philippines in 1902. Threatened with closure after World War I, Fort Harrison found new life in the 1920s, first as a tuberculosis sanitorium and then as a veterans hospital. Construction of a new hospital building in the 1930s modernized the facility. The Devil’s Brigade (First Special Service Force) and Montana National Guard troops trained here during World War II, only briefly interrupting the fort’s primary, continuing mission as a Veterans Affairs healthcare facility.
]]>George W. and Eliza Shaw hired architects Carl. M. Neuhausen and Frank M. Williams to design this stone carriage house in 1890. In addition to housing the family’s carriage, it held horses, chickens, and feed. In 1893, the Shaws, in partnership with Eliza’s father, Hugh Menown, remodeled it into a food processing factory. It was Montana’s first successful food manufacturing plant and the only home industry in the neighborhood. Their products—sold statewide—included Montana Peerless Baking Powder, Shaw's Best Pancake Flour, and Shaw's Best Wheat Cream-lets (hot cereal). The company used only flour milled from Montana-grown wheat—an effort to promote home industries and bring Montana out of the economic depression that followed the 1893 Silver Panic. Three generations of the family operated what had started as H. Menown and Company, which after Hugh’s death in 1895, became Shaw’s Best. George served as sales and business manager while Eliza and the children ran the factory. The Shaws’ youngest child Lida purchased the business in 1911. Sadly, she died of tuberculosis in 1912, and George died in 1913. Eliza and their son George continued the business until 1918, when they converted the building into a garage/storage space. Thereafter, neither the Shaws nor the Sidor family, who bought the property in 1954, ever made alterations to the second floor. In 2021, wood barrels of flour and tartaric acid, mixing machinery, never-used Shaw’s Best packaging, and a hybrid motor-driven belt and pulley system remained intact in this rare residential factory.
]]>The MacDonald Pass airway beacon was the last of eighteen beacons constructed across western Montana as part of the Northern Transcontinental Airway’s New York City to Seattle airmail route. The ninety-one-foot-tall, steel structure held a revolving, one-million-candle-power beacon originally encased in a glass dome. Red and green directional lights attached to the tower indicated the route, while flashing red course lights identified the beacon in Morse code. Gas-powered generators powered the beacon until circa 1942 when it was connected to electrical lines. Before the advent of radio navigation, airway beacons served as a critical nighttime navigational aide, guiding pilots along routes between airports. From 1926 to 1938, the U.S. Bureau of Air Commerce created 18,000 miles of airway corridors and installed 1,550 airway beacons to mark the routes for night flying. In Montana, the International Derrick and Equipment Company of Columbus, Ohio, fabricated the towers, which were paid for with funds from the Works Projects Administration. Construction of six beacons between Bozeman Pass and Helena and twelve beacons between Lookout Pass and MacDonald Pass began in February 1935. When the Civil Air Administration lit this beacon in November 1935—completing Montana’s system—over 4,000 people braved frigid weather to attend a celebratory event at the Helena airport. Though most of the country’s beacons were replaced with ground-based radio stations by the mid-1970s, Montana’s private pilots successfully lobbied to keep seventeen beacons lit through 2017. As of 2021, several adopted beacons still light the night sky, recalling Montana’s aviation heritage.
]]>Jacob T. Gove, a miner and assayer, developed the Bonanza Chief gold mine near Montana City in 1883, netting over $9,000 from three carloads of ore. With his small fortune, he opened an assay office, built the house next door at 229 for his family, and this brick home as a rental property. Residential land was in short supply during Helena’s heady 1880s, as evidenced by the proximity of the north neighbor. Attorney J. M. Clements, later a well-known district court judge, lived here in 1889. The Goves lived here from 1890 until 1891 when they sold both houses to Julia Otto for $5,000. Mrs. Otto lived next door with boarders and rented this house to tenants, including office clerks, cooks, and in 1900, bartender John Milch and his wife Ida. In 1914, German immigrant William E. Mundt purchased both houses. Mundt worked for the A. M. Holter Hardware Co. for fifty years. He applied stucco to the brick walls, most likely following Helena’s devastating October 1935 earthquakes. Although stucco covers the original brick, the tall windows and interior fir floors are original.
]]>Traders, ranchers, farmers, miners, homesteaders, veterans, and children lay silently here in this small, still-active, community cemetery. Simple, mostly unadorned grave markers are all that remain of Silver City, a small transportation hub and mining community (and one-time county seat). Enterprising Fort Benton traders and their Indian wives took up claims here where the new Mullan Wagon Road crossed Silver Creek. These families—including Jacob and Margaret Schmidt, William and Mary Kaiser, Joseph and Mary Cobelle, and others—ranched along Silver Creek before gold miners flocked to the area. In 1864, Silver Creek attracted California miner William Brown who uncovered gold-rich gravel bars on the Cobelle’s land, sparking a minor gold rush. Traders like Cobelle took their profits and moved on. Active from 1864 into the 1890s, Silver City blossomed to include this cemetery, cabins, and a school, as well as the saloons, hotels, and stores that catered to miners, stage lines, and freighters on the nearby Benton Road. Gold deposits played out by the late-1870s, but the fertile land drew ranchers and farmers. William Brown and his grown children began ranching alongside seasoned ranch families like the Gehrings and Sanfords. During the 1880s, now-prominent area families like the McWetheys, Synnesses, and Wilborns claimed homestead lands and began supplying Helena and distant markets with fresh meat and produce. Their community spanned Silver Creek, Little Prickly Pear Creek, and the Hilger Valley. While Silver City itself faded away, this humble cemetery remains, reflecting the area’s history and the legacies of the families buried here.
]]>Charles and Frances Bernier had this Minimal Traditional English cottage style home built in 1940. Contractor Bob James likely built the home, and mason Lewis Reid laid the arched white-marble doorway surround. Reid’s distinctive stonework decorates the entrances, fireplaces, and entire façades of many Helena homes. He always used a Celtic bond, a reflection of his Scottish heritage. The Minimal Traditional style grew out of the Federal Housing Administration’s (FHA) Great Depression-era loan program, created in 1934, to finance small homes the average working American could afford. In addition to offering insured, low-interest mortgages, the FHA published house-plan catalogs that promoted modest homes with minimal decoration. Private house-plan publishers followed suit, and by 1949 more than seven million Minimal Traditional style homes were built across the United States. The Berniers lived here for twenty years. Charles was a superintendent at the Montana Power Company until 1946 and a Masonic Lodge member. He also devoted countless hours to promoting Red Cross blood donations and teaching first-aid classes. Frances was a retired teacher and an involved member of the Eastern Star, Helena Women’s Club, and the PEO Sisterhood.
]]>Born on a ranch near Missoula, Jeannette Rankin graduated from the University of Montana in 1902. She studied social work in New York City and worked in an orphanage before deciding that she wanted to focus on the root causes of society’s problems. Realizing that “to have decent laws for children, sanitary jails, [and] safe food supplies, women would have to vote,” Rankin became a full-time suffrage organizer in 1910. After successful campaigns in Washington and California, she returned to Montana, where she helped pass the state’s suffrage amendment in 1914. Supported by Montana’s newly enfranchised women voters, Jeannette Rankin won election to Congress in 1916, becoming the nation’s first female representative. Her first vote was against the United States’ entry into World War I. After a term in the House, Rankin lost her bid for Senate in 1918, in part because her support of striking miners had made an enemy of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. Unable to secure reelection, Rankin became a full-time peace activist. She purchased a home near Athens, Georgia, but kept her legal residence in Montana, spending every summer from 1923 to 1956 here. In 1940, Rankin once again ran for Congress. Montanans sent her back to the House, where she cast the sole vote against U.S. entrance into World War II. Although Jeannette’s brother Wellington owned this property, she spent more time living in the simple, frame ranch house than he did. Due to this association, the National Park Service designated ninety acres of the ranch as a National Historic Landmark in 1976.
]]>Successful farmers and ranchers need to know their crops, animals, and the markets, but they also must be mechanically inclined, resourceful, and self-reliant. This was especially true in the Gehring Ranch’s early days when a trip to the hardware store was an expensive daylong commitment. As the surviving objects still hanging in this shop demonstrate, almost nothing was disposable. The shop was essential to creating and maintaining the ranch’s basic elements. Here the Gehrings forged gate hardware, sharpened cutters, or repaired a double-tree hitch. If an object became obsolete, its remnants were kept for possible reuse elsewhere. The original log shop, built between 1871 and 1880 as a chicken coop, is a study in adaptation and reuse. When the Gehrings’ brood outgrew this building, the shop moved in. A substantial timber-frame addition came years later to accommodate a blacksmith shop complete with a brick forge and handmade workbench. The shop’s random mix of log notching styles and variable width board-and-batten siding illustrates the fact that the Gehrings constructed it as time and material allowed and valued the building more for its function than for its appearance.
]]>The Gehring house reflects the ranch’s growth from a pioneer log cabin to a modern twentieth-century family home. Bartholomew Gehring camped out under his wagon while building the first wing of this ranch house in 1865. In November 1871, he married Jane Auchard, the sister of his friend and neighbor David Auchard. A log addition followed when only son, David, was born in 1873. Soon after, they added a summer kitchen to the rear. Around 1900, a carpenter completed the tricky task of harmoniously joining the two log cabins and the kitchen under one roof and added clapboard siding and a front porch. Bartholomew died suddenly in a ranch accident on July 4, 1900, and Jane passed away in 1912. David married neighbor Ann Hardie in 1913, and children Ruth, Clifford, and Jack arrived over the next eleven years. In 1928, a carpenter enlarged their small cabin with a modern two-story rear addition, including a cellar, kitchen, and upstairs bedrooms. A concrete swimming pool, added at the same time, shows that the Gehrings took time for fun despite the hard work of ranch life.
]]>Establishing a ranch in 1860s Montana required many hands. Help from relatives and friends and the able assistance of horses meant survival. This stable and the house are among the first buildings Bartholomew Gehring built. His brother, Frank, who homesteaded nearby, helped him harvest the logs and build the stable. While the stable had a hayloft and likely a small grain bin, it did not provide enough feed storage for a flourishing ranch. Shortly after receiving his final homestead papers in 1877, Gehring built a log granary to the southeast of the stable, which allowed him to add more stock and dedicate more acreage to feed grain. The granary follows a common plan: it is centrally positioned in the corrals and elevated on piers to resist ground moisture, invasive pests, and facilitate wagon bed loading. Inside, grain bins flank a central hall. As the Gehring family acquired more sophisticated buildings, the log stable fell out of use in the early 1900s and was near collapse by 2017. In 2018, Hal Harper and a crew of volunteers rescued the stable, restoring it to its original appearance.
]]>Although the Gehring Ranch is known today as a cattle and bison operation, David Gehring introduced commercial hog production to the ranch in 1910, beginning a long partnership with the Montana Meat Co. in Helena. In his journal on May 27, 1910, Gehring recorded the acquisition of two young sows from his neighbors the Hardies. He established a hog pasture and by October laid stones for the foundation of this hog shed, which he completed in November, just in time for winter. Gehring tracked the details of the hog business, writing on March 25, 1911, “Hogs eat 2 ½ pounds grain per day each,” an apparent sign of a healthy litter to come. Just four days later, the first litter was born. As Gehring’s herd grew he added the log and hay-covered hog shelter. To produce needed hog feed, he built a water-powered feed mill to the south along Silver Creek in 1913, which he expanded in 1927. The ranch phased out hog production in the 1940s, but the now vacant shed, shelter, and towering feed mill remain as symbols of Gehring’s successful operation.
]]>Not all outhouses deserve interpretive signs, but the Gehring outhouse is an important local reminder of the U.S. government’s efforts in the 1930s to improve sanitation and public health in rural areas. Part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was established during the Great Depression to employ vast numbers of jobless Americans and improve crumbling infrastructure. While the WPA is best known for large-scale building and infrastructure projects, its sanitation program was far reaching, with some 2.3 million outhouses built across the nation. These WPA outhouses remain easily recognizable, as they are all identical. The WPA provided the plans and labor, and the property owner provided the materials. On the outside, the plan dictated a four-foot-by-five-foot wood frame, an overhanging shed roof with a wide fascia board, and wood siding. Inside, a six-foot-deep concrete-lined vault held waste safely, and the concrete foundation and integrated molded concrete pot made it easy to keep clean. Last but not least, each outhouse had a square wood pipe to direct polluted air from the pot to the outside.
]]>Family accounts associate the bunkhouse with the original Auchard homestead north of the Gehring Ranch. The log skids on which it rests indicate that the building was mobile and a team of draft horses could have dragged it from the Auchard’s. Bunkhouses fill a common ranch need—housing for hired hands. Although most of the hired hands who stayed here tended to farm and ranch duties, carpenter Nelson Sherburne lived in the bunkhouse in 1900 while he remodeled the Gehring House. Sherburne may have introduced lath and plaster to the bunkhouse interior. Often hired men would eat in the rancher’s house to discuss the day’s accomplishments and work plans, but the bunkhouse afforded its occupants privacy and the comforts of a soft bed and warm stove. The pages of a 1928 magazine glued to the walls, a common thermal improvement of the time, attest to the building’s marginal comfort. Although the bunkhouse fell out of use when Gehring acquired another used bunkhouse in 1929, this original bunkhouse served as an occasional home for transient men in search of work during the Great Depression.
]]>Not long after Bartholomew Gehring built his stable, house, and hen house in the late 1860s, he built a substantial stone and log root cellar to augment the cellar beneath his home. Measuring five hundred square feet, the sunken stone walls and massive upper log walls served as an early day walk-in cooler. This building was crucial in the Gehrings’ initial success. It allowed them to store the fresh produce and other perishables that they sold to travelers along the road and delivered to the nearby communities of Silver, Helena, and Marysville. By the early 1890s, markets were changing, and the Gehrings saw better opportunities in raising livestock. Through the first decades of the 1900s, the family expanded its land holdings, constructed new buildings, and mechanized while consistently adding more chickens, cattle, and hogs. After the root cellar was converted for use as a hen house, the Gehrings built a timber-frame addition to accommodate a larger brood. As with other structures on the property, this building’s changing use points to the Gehrings’ tireless efforts over four generations to adapt, modernize, and sustain the ranch.
]]>Residents in the North Helena Valley thought the early morning smoke rising near Silver Creek on September 8, 1928, was a wildfire. They soon learned that David Gehring’s barn was burning. The fire destroyed the barn and, to add insult to injury, took the lives of five horses. The large board-and-batten barn with its sweeping catslide haymow was less than thirty years old and insured for only half the cost of a new replacement. Despite the lack of insurance, drought, and rough economic times, David hired carpenters to rebuild the barn right away. Professionally designed and built barns like this one were a departure from the rough-hewn, labor-intensive buildings that preceded them. The new barn reflects the modern era of barn building and uses dimensional lumber and lightweight balloon framing. Its self-supporting gambrel roof housed a voluminous loft with a pulley and fork system attached to the ridge beam for easy hay loading. In 1933, David further expanded his milk operation when he added a combination cattle barn, milk shed, and loafing shed to the south of the corral.
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