{"id":14599,"date":"2016-10-26T09:06:36","date_gmt":"2016-10-26T15:06:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=14599"},"modified":"2016-10-27T09:10:05","modified_gmt":"2016-10-27T15:10:05","slug":"something-lost-memories-of-an-earlier-freer-heights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2016\/10\/something-lost-memories-of-an-earlier-freer-heights\/","title":{"rendered":"Something lost: Memories of an earlier, freer Heights"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Sartorie\"<\/a>

Phoebe Tollefson<\/p>

Mike Sartorie is finishing his 35th\u2014and final year\u2014 farming in the Heights.<\/p><\/div>\n

Editor\u2019s note<\/strong>: This is the third\u00a0piece in a three-day series looking what has been lost as Billings has grown steadily in recent decades. Over the past two days, Phoebe Tollefson wrote about the South Side and the West End. Today she takes a look at the Heights.<\/em><\/p>\n

The apartment complexes, strip malls, big box stores and houses in the Heights cover some of the most fertile soil in the Yellowstone River valley. And they have transformed one Billings native\u2019s favorite boyhood camping spots.<\/p>\n

In the late 1950s and early \u201960s, Ben Laws Jr., who now lives in Texas, used to tromp around the Heights with his Boy Scout troop. It was just a short drive from Laws\u2019 home and, at the time, open and wild enough to be considered the outdoors.<\/p>\n

On one trip to the Yellowstone River near Two Moon Park, Laws\u2019 fellow Boy Scouts learned just how raw the place was, after stumbling upon a small section of grass-covered ground that sounded hollow.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know, walking around the ground,\u201d Laws said, taking a few stomps to re-enact the scene, \u201cit\u2019s like, \u2018There\u2019s something under here!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Someone had dug out a spot underneath a nondescript part of the river bank, built a trap door over it and filled it with stolen goods: televisions, radios and other household valuables.<\/p>\n

The boys told Laws\u2019 father, who was the scoutmaster.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey got the sheriff involved, they staked it out, and actually caught these guys,\u201d Laws said, laughing.<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>In another adventure, this time near the Warfield Ranch off Alkali Creek Road, Laws\u2019 friends were playing near a stand of trees and came across a body placed in a tree, which they believed was a Native American burial site. The Scouts reported their finding to the Yellowstone Historical Society, but Laws never heard what became of the body.<\/p>\n

Laws moved away from Billings in 1963 and a large portion of the Heights was annexed in the 1980s, spurring yet more commercial and housing development. Driving the area now, Laws would be hard-pressed to find many similarities between the adventure spots of his youth and today\u2019s Heights, which has outgrown Kalispell by over 2,000 residents.<\/p>\n

Around the same time Laws and his buddies were camping in the Heights, Bill Kennedy was spending summer afternoons visiting his extended family.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the early \u201960s, we would go out and it would be the country,\u201d said Kennedy, a former Yellowstone County commissioner and now president of the MSUB Foundation.<\/p>\n

Kennedy grew up in town but had relatives living on truck farms on both the east and west sides of Main Street. \u201cThe Bench,\u201d Kennedy said, was the name for everything east of Main.<\/p>\n

Kennedy especially liked visiting one uncle\u2019s melon patch.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe would go out there and he would bend over, grab a cantaloupe, in his hand like that\u2014they all had big hands\u2014and grab the cantaloupe. He would brush it off, open it up, slice you off a slice, give it to you,\u201d he said, reveling in the memory. \u201cYour face would be dirty, you would be sticky, but you know what? Some of the best fruit around.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Melons\"<\/a>

Bill Kennedy\\’s great-aunt, Archangela Cucciardi, sells melons at her stand in the Bench, circa 1930s.<\/p><\/div>\n

Another uncle farmed land on the west side of Main Street, where a Wal-Mart store is today. That family made their own wine and would treat visitors to a glass, or drink some during a break on hot days spent in the field.<\/p>\n

Kennedy said it would have been better if Billings had developed northward, west of Main Street, and left the portion east of Main Street agricultural, given its rich soil and its proximity to the river.<\/p>\n

Like Gabel on the West End, Mike Sartorie would no doubt have preferred this. The story of farmland loss that is still playing out on Billings\u2019 far West End is almost complete in the Heights.<\/p>\n

Sartorie, who is a third-generation local farmer like Gabel, can stand in the middle of his family\u2019s 15-acre pumpkin patch east of Main Street, turn in a circle and see buildings everywhere: subdivisions, standalone houses and the city\u2019s new Medicine Crow Middle School.<\/p>\n

Sartorie, in his 35th and final year of farming, said he\u2019s stayed in the game longer than he should have.<\/p>\n

Quitting will likely lead to a rapid turnover of the Heights area land he leases to farm, he said. The tax break his landlords get from the agricultural classification make it affordable for them to keep the land, he suspects, and without that, they\u2019ll need to sell.<\/p>\n

But Sartorie is relieved to be done farming. Growing crops in an urban setting had its share of difficulties, including dealing with crop thefts and an overall lack of the support that farmers in rural communities enjoy.<\/p>\n

Being a \u201clone gun\u201d farmer surrounded by residents, Sartorie has felt obligated to shut his tractor off at night, even when he wasn\u2019t finished working his crops, in order to maintain quiet hours.<\/p>\n

Sartorie remembers when Main Street was just two lanes. He used to back out of his driveway onto Hawthorne Lane without looking for traffic.<\/p>\n

Soon, however, contractors will begin tearing down a horse barn and other farm outbuildings on his property to make room for more houses in the Sartorie Subdivision. The family has sectioned off a corner of its land for this, and their plans to develop it date back to the 1970s. Sartorie said he and his parents saw change coming to the area a long time ago and chose to adapt, rather than fight the inevitable.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou could say, \u2018Well, I was here first,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cBut in reality, that isn\u2019t a very logical thought process, because you can\u2019t stop progress. You just cannot do it.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Monday<\/strong>: On the South Side, memories of a different world<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On Tuesday<\/strong>: Expansion and change on the West End<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Phoebe<\/span>\u00a0Tollefson has written for outlets large and small, from McClatchy DC to The Sheridan Press. She lives in Billings, her hometown.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editor\u2019s note: This is the third\u00a0piece in a three-day series looking what has been lost as Billings has grown steadily in recent decades. Over the past two days, Phoebe Tollefson wrote about the South Side and the West End. Today she takes a look at the Heights. The apartment complexes, strip malls, big box stores […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":14600,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,18],"tags":[5094,807,5095,5096],"class_list":["post-14599","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-billings","category-diversions","tag-ben-laws-jr","tag-bill-kennedy","tag-mike-sartorie","tag-the-heights","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14599\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14600"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}