Living and breathing history in Fort Benton

FORT BENTON — Most towns in Montana celebrate their history in some fashion or another, and some towns — Miles City and Butte come to mind — seem particularly interested in preserving the past.

But inch for inch, it’s hard to believe that any other town in Montana matches Fort Benton for recording, documenting and memorializing its history. You can hardly turn around in this town of 1,400 people without seeing a museum, restored historical structure, plaque, statue or monument.

It helps to have a history worth celebrating, of course. Founded in 1846, Fort Benton bills itself as “the birthplace of Montana.” It was the last fur trading post on the Upper Missouri River and the terminus of the Mullan Road, the overland route that linked the Missouri and Columbia rivers.

During the steamboat era it became the head of navigation on the Missouri River, earning it the additional description as “the world’s innermost port.”

The other key ingredient was the passionate stewardship of two men, Jack Lepley and the late Joel F. Overholser.

“The reason it all happened was a guy named Jack Lepley,” said Randy Morger, who succeeded Lepley last year as executive director of the River and Plains Society. “He made it his life’s work to make this happen.”

Morger was referring to the many museums and historical projects and monuments in Fort Benton, nearly all of which Lepley had a hand in creating or expanding.

The contribution of Overholser, the longtime editor of the River Press newspaper, was to gather and publish vast numbers of historical documents and materials. Ken Robison, a historian who lives in Great Falls and does a lot of research and writing in Fort Benton, said Overholser was famous for the special editions of his newspaper.

During his time at the River Press, from the 1940s through the 1970s, Robison said, Overholser produced numerous 20- to 30-page special sections containing “monumental amounts of history.” In his retirement, Robison said, Overholser published a history of Fort Benton “stuffed with the contents of his archives and vertical files.”

Also worthy of mention is Bill Johnstone, who started Lepley down the path of saving and celebrating history. Johnstone was the superintendent of schools in Fort Benton in the 1950s, “and Bill Johnstone really wanted to build a museum,” Morger said.

He enlisted the teachers in his district to work as volunteers, one of whom was Lepley, a fourth-generation Montanan. They formed the CIA — the Community Improvement Association — which in turn founded a museum that would come to be called the Museum of the Upper Missouri.

The CIA expanded to take on many other projects, including the care and upkeep of the old bridge, now a pedestrian bridge over the Missouri in the heart of the downtown. The association also took ownership of The Mandan, a keelboat made for the film version of A.B. Guthrie’s great novel, “The Big Sky.”

It also undertook the preservation and restoration of the old firehouse and home of I.G. Baker, “probably one of the oldest houses in Montana,” according to Morger.

Over the years, more museums were added to what eventually would be called the Heritage Complex. They include the Museum of the Northern Great Plains, which includes an outdoor Homestead Village and the Hornaday Smithsonian Buffalo and Western Art Gallery.

The Hornaday Buffalo exhibit features the mounts of six bison that were taken in 1886 from the last wild herd between the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers by William T. Hornaday and put on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in 1887.

They remained on display for 70 years before they were dismantled and put in storage in Montana in 1955. They collected dusted until 1996, when they were restored and put on display at the Fort Benton museum.

Other components of the complex are the Montana Agricultural Center and the adjoining Montana Agricultural Museum. The center also houses the Schwinden Library and Archives — Ted Schwinden was governor when the ag museum was created — and the Joel F. Overholser Historical Research Center.

It was the River and Plains Society, founded by Lepley, that oversaw many of the museums and which began talking in the 1990s about restoring the original Fort Benton. All that was left of the fort at that point was one blockhouse, the oldest building in Montana.

In time, the society restored the blockhouse and reconstructed a warehouse, a trade store, workshops and a compound wall. The crowning glory of the fort is the Bourgeois House, which includes the Starr Gallery of Western Art. The gallery features the No More Buffalo collection by Montana sculptor Bob Scriver and a collection of Karl Bodmer prints, a spectacular record of Montana landscapes and Indian culture in the 1830s.

One of the more engaging aspects of Fort Benton’s attention to its history is the series of interpretive installations along the river levee that was once the buzzing commercial center of this port city.

All along a well-used bike-pedestrian trail there are interpretive signs explaining the history of the town. The original signs were created by Gail Stensland, another teacher inspired by Johnstone to get involved in historic preservation. For decades, Stensland had a hand in nearly every community improvement project in town.

Also found along the levee trail is The Mandan keelboat and sculptures of favorite sons and one favorite dog — Shep, the faithful hound who returned to the Great Northern Railway depot every day for years after his departed master’s casket was shipped away for burial.

In addition to the Shep statue, there is a monument over Shep’s own burial plot on a hill overlooking Fort Benton. This is a town serious about remembering. The grandest feature on the levee is another sculpture by Bob Scriver, a larger-than-life depiction of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea and her infant son.

Just upstream of the town is the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument Interpretive Center, a Bureau of Land Management museum that tells the cultural and natural history of the area.

One would not expect to experience museum fatigue in a town this size, but it is possible. You might want to give yourself a couple of days to see everything. And if you’re going to stay overnight, where better than the Grand Union Hotel?

The hotel reminds one that historic preservation is not only the province of community groups and government agencies. The Grand Union, a monument to the former prosperity of Fort Benton, was completed in 1883 and finally abandoned 100 years later.

It sat vacant until 1999, when Montana natives James and Cheryl Gagnon completed their multimillion-dollar renovation and reopened it.

“People come to Fort Benton just to stay at the Grand Union,” Morger said.

That’s the kind of town Fort Benton is. It attracts people like the Gagnons, who are alive to history and impressed with the spirit of local residents.

Another is Fay Todd, a New Jersey resident with Montana connections. Using her own resources and those of the Starr Foundation, founded by her grandfather, she has been a major benefactor of Fort Benton projects. Among other things, she funded the purchase of the Bodmer lithographs and John Mix Stanley’s oil portrait of Alexander Culbertson, the founder of Fort Benton.

Todd, who was in Fort Benton over Memorial Day weekend for a celebration to kick off the summer season, said she came to Fort Benton on the recommendation of the Montana novelist Thomas McGuane.

She heard him speak about his association with American Rivers, an organization that seeks to preserve and protect rivers, and she asked him about possibly helping the group. But American Rivers’ projects, while admirable, she said, were too large and vague, while she preferred small, specific projects.

McGuane said she might want to visit Fort Benton. She did, and part of her first visit was floating the Missouri River with members of the River and Plains Society, including Jack Lepley.

As Todd remembers it, “he had all these wonderful ideas.” And that was that.

“She just fell for Fort Benton and really developed a love for it,” Morger said.

Which brings us back to Joel F. Overholser and his love of Fort Benton and the history of the Upper Missouri region. His father, Joel R. Overholser, had operated the River Press for nearly half a century before Joel F. took it over, continuing and expanding the newspaper’s role in preserving local history.

The book Joel. F. wrote in his retirement, “Fort Benton: The World’s Innermost Port,” was a huge “soup-to-nuts” history of the area, Robison said, but it left off at the end of the open-range ranching era.

“Joel was never all that interested in the last hundred years,” Robison said.

It was also after the sale of the River Press in 1993 when Overholser approached Lepley and asked him where he was supposed to do his writing and research, now that he no longer had his newspaper office. Lepley suggested merging Overholser’s archives with those of the Museum of the Northern Great Plains.

From then until his death in 1999, Robison wrote in a sketch of Overholser’s life, his office at the museum “was a welcoming research center for a constant stream of historians and researchers.”

Now known as the Joel F. Overholser Historical Research Center, stuffed with a priceless collection of rare books, documents and records, it remains a hub of historical work.

Robison has used the archives to write four books of area and Montana history, and he has another under contract. Another regular researcher there is Hank Armstrong of nearby Geraldine, who has written seven books of local history, described by Robison as “very specialized and very good.”

Morger said Fort Benton has been primarily an agricultural town for decades, but the decline of family farms has eroded the economic impact of agriculture.

Now, he said, the town is slowly growing, attracting retirees and others drawn by Fort Benton’s small-town charms and its passionate attachment to its past.

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