Lavina, Montana
Posted by: Groundspeak Premium Member T0SHEA
N 46° 17.642 W 108° 56.264
12T E 658836 N 5128784
Now a sleepy little prairie town, Lavina was one of the lucky ones which survived both the Montana drought of the "Terrible Twenties", then endured a second helping during the "Dirty Thirties".
Waymark Code: WMWAEJ
Location: Montana, United States
Date Posted: 08/02/2017
Published By:Groundspeak Premium Member pmaupin
Views: 1

The "Lavina" of today was actually the second "Lavina" in the vicinity. The first was a mile upstream on the Musselshell River, begun in 1883 as a stage station. After a couple of years the stage station housed a post office, several residents, a hotel, a branch store of T.C. Power and Co. and the little hamlet of "Lavina" was born. When the "Milwaukee Road" railway pushed its tracks through what was then Fergus County in 1907 its surveyors chose a different spot for the station, a mile downstream from the stage station. Realizing it would be fruitless to dispute the railway's choice of location the original "Lavina" moved to its present location and started building anew.

Prosperous and growing for only a decade or so, the town, as did the rest of the state, suffered greatly from the drought which befell Montana in the teens. By 1923 the Lavina State Bank failed and the overly ambitious Adams Hotel closed. The Slayton Mercantile Co., the largest retail outlet in the town, soldiered on, remaining open until 2004. The town reached its population peak about 1920, never again attaining that size.

Incidentally, the three buildings mentioned above are all listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

Following is the story of the early days of Lavina, from Golden Valley County.

Lavina was founded just forty miles north of the Northern Pacific railhead in Billings by one of the Territory's best known pioneers, T.C. Power.
In earlier years, T.C. Power was well established in Fort Benton at the time that fortified fur post changed into a thriving city when rush to the gold mines increased river trade on the Upper Missouri.

T.C. Power knew until 1880 Central Montana abounded in wildlife with thousands of buffalo but was practically uninhabited. Never-the-less, he knew with the coming of the railroad envisioned a stage line to answer the demand for a direct over-land route to connect the railroad with his holdings in Fort Benton so in May of 1882 he organized the Billings - Benton Stage Company. It was the first north-south line to carry mail on coaches.

About midway on the stage line there was the river that cut its age-old course through the trees and tall grass meadows of the wide Musselshell Valley. Where there was a good ford, he chose an ideal site for a station, and said "With Clate Warner and other hired help, we put up stage stables, mess house, bunk house for the men to sleep in, a store, and of course my saloon. That was the biggest business of them all." Even though he was appointed as the first post master, he made the rounds of the stage line every month but none of the stations pleased him as much as the one on the south bank of the Musselshell, and in memory of a former sweetheart, Walter Burke named it Lavina.

As the Musselshell Valley settled up thick in the summer of 1882, the stage stop became known as Old Lavina and it was a hub of activity.

The bell tolled for Old Lavina when the surveyors chose a new town site a mile downstream in the wide bend of the Musselshell that had been the old Indian campground. A few months later on February 16, 1908, the first passenger train steamed past the old stage stop and pulled up to the depot in what was now New Lavina.
From Golden Valley County
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Slayton Mercantile
Adams Hotel
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Lavina State Bank
Methodist-Lutheran Church
Wikipedia Url: [Web Link]

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