SOMERS: A COMPANY TOWN
In the late 1890s, James J Hill, founder of the Great Northern Railway, sent John O'Brien into the Flathead Valley to build a lumber mill at the head of Flathead Lake. In 1900 the railroad finished a spur line from Kalispell to the mill site. It named the town after George Somers, one of its executives. The settlement quickly spawned ethnic neighborhoods called Swede Hill, Dirty Dozen and Picklev1lle.
For years rivermen ran mill logs down the Flathead River during the spring runoff. Tugboats then gathered the logs in booms and chugged them over to the mill. The Somers Lumber Company grew to operate the sawmill, a tie-treatment plant, and a factory to make boxes for shipping locally grown apples. At its peak (1937) the mill employed 375 workers and produced 60 million board feet of lumber.
At one point, the company owned the townsite, 122 houses, a company store, the water and electric utilities, and John O'Brien's mansion on the promontory - still the town's dominant feature. Then after World War II, rapid changes in the timber industry devastated the operation, particularly the truck - hauling of logs destroyed the Somers Lumber Company's profits.
In 1948 the Great Northern sold the sawmill property and the townsite to a Seattle salvage dealer. He resold it piecemeal. Only then did Somers die as a company town.
From the Plaque