The Place:
The community of Somers came into being in 1901 when the Great Northern Railway built an 11 mile spur line south from Kalispell to a sawmill on the shore of Flathead Lake. Initially the purpose of the mill was to supply railroad ties to the Great Northern. Originally owned by local businessman John O'Brien, the sawmill was bought outright in 1906 by the Great Northern's J.J. Hill and continued to produce lumber at the rate of 30 million board feet per year. By 1910 it had become the largest sawmill in the Flathead Valley.
John O'Brien built 122 company houses and a general store in Somers for the employees of the sawmill and the railroad. While the sawmill closed and was dismantled in 1949, Somers lives on, the trading centre for an agricultural area, with much fruit growing taking place in the vicinity. The community, unincorporated and remaining a census-designated place, is also a summer resort and vacation spot, situated at the northwest corner of Flathead Lake. The population today stands in the vicinity of 1,200.
Years after the sawmill closed, the Somers - Kalispell Spur Line also closed and has been repurposed as the
Great Northern Historical Trail, AKA the
Sonny Boon Memorial Trail, after Sonny Boone, among many other things a member of the Board of Directors of Rails
to Trails. The trail is available year round for hiking, biking and cross country skiing. The south (Somers) end of the trail is marked by a green painted
0-4-0 Porter switching engine.
Great Northern Railway magnate James J. Hill contracted with John O’Brien to build a sawmill on the north end of Flathead Lake in 1900, with the provision that the John O’Brien Lumber Company would supply the Great Northern with 600,000 railroad ties per year for 20 years. The lumber company owned 122 homes in this company town and furnished water and electricity to its workers. The company floated logs down the Whitefish, Stillwater, Swan, and Flathead rivers and across Flathead Lake to the mill at Somers, where they were milled into railroad ties and lumber. The mill added a tie treatment plant in 1901, and the railroad purchased the entire operation a few years later. The Great Northern Railway closed the lumber mill in 1948 but continued to operate the tie plant until its closure in 1986 by the Burlington Northern Railroad. The town was named for George O. Somers, a Vice President of the Great Northern Railroad, and the person responsible for overseeing the development of the new lumber town.
From the Montana Place Names Companion
The town’s name is thought to honour George O. Somers, the Great Northern agent in charge of building the railroad spur line from Kalispell to the Somers docks in 1901.
Actually, we have managed to unearth a second version of the naming of the town:
A man named Francis VanRinsum has (or had, as the case may be) the belief that Somers may have been named after one Hans Somers, who ran a sawmill where the town now stands as early as the 1850s.
We tend to believe the former version as the town was essentially built by the Great Northern and remained a company owned town until almost 1950.
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.
From a historical sign in the town