Hence these customized manhole covers and wooden crosswalks. This manhole cover is in the intersection in front of the downtown Subway outlet. This is toward the northwest corner of the West Pine and Ryman Street intersection. Everything on this intersection is new. The Subway used to be a pizza joint, the board cross walk is new (it used to be brick and pavement) and they even changed the location of the manhole when they changed the cover. I expect this means that soon all the downtown manhole covers will be of this type.
These manhole covers were manufactured by the
East Jordan Iron Works of East Jordan, Michigan, founded in 1883. The company is now a division of EJ Group, Inc. which now supplies products to over 140 countries around the world.
The stampings on the cover read:
The Garden City
Missoula
Hub of Five Valleys
Now we just have to figure out what the five valleys are. We know that
Missoula is on the
Clark Fork River and that the
Blackfoot River meets it just east of Missoula, at Bonner. The
Bitterroot River meets the Clark Fork at the far western edge of Missoula. However, it seems that the motto has not so much to do with the rivers as the convergence of five mountain ranges at Missoula. They are the
Bitterroot Mountains,
Sapphire Range,
Garnet Range,
Rattlesnake Mountains, and the Reservation Divide. And there's our geography lesson for today.