RED LODGE
Coal was discovered in the Rock Creek Valley nearly two decades before Red Lodge was established as a mail stop on the Meeteese trail in 1884. In 1887 the Rocky Fork Coal Company opened the first large-scale mine at Red Lodge, sparking the community's first building boom, consisting mostly of hastily constructed shacks and log huts. The completion of the Northern Pacific Railway branch line to Red Lodge in 1890 resulted in the construction of many brick and sandstone buildings that now line the city's main street.
Like all mining camps, Red Lodge had a large population of single men and an abundance of saloons. For many years the notorious "Liver-eating" Johnston kept the peace as the town's first constable. Red Lodge also boasted several churches and social clubs for those not inclined toward the city's more earthier entertainment.
Hundreds of people came to Red Lodge in the 1890s and early 1900s. Immigrants from all over Europe worked shoulder to shoulder in the coal mines, but settled in neighborhoods called Finn Town, Little Italy and Hi-bug. Their cultural traditions endured and are celebrated at the city's annual festival of Nations.
Production in the coal mines declined after World War I, eventually leading to their closure by 1932. The completion of the scenic Beartooth Highway in 1936 revitalized Red Lodge by linking it directly to Yellowstone National Park. Today, Red Lodge's past is represented by its historic buildings and by the pride its citizens take in its history and traditions.
From the Montana Historical Highway Marker
The History of the Montana Historical Highway Markers
[It was a man named Bob Fletcher whose idea it was, in 1935, to produce roadside signs which imparted knowledge of Montana's history, each sign containing a bit of the story of some local event or site.] The rustic-looking sign boards were mounted on lodgepole pine posts and hung from decorative routed crossbeams. The posts were set in fieldstone bases to make them eye-catching, rustic—and crash resistant. The sign texts were hand-lettered on five-by-eight-foot plywood boards set in log frames. The first marker, "Gates of the Mountains," was installed on U.S. Highway 91, about sixteen miles north of Helena, in early July 1935. It was followed by twenty-nine more signs by the end of the year.
Bob Fletcher's success in promoting and developing the tourist industry in the early 1930s enabled him to pitch a project that he'd been considering since the 1920s: roadside highway markers that described and celebrated Montana's colorful history. This idea allegedly originated after he became bored reading the historical markers installed by the Daughters of the American Revolution along South Dakota's roads in the mid 1920s. He felt he could do better in Montana by making the marker texts big enough to read from a car "and sometimes humorous." Fletcher later recalled that the texts "should not be a lot of stilted copy with dates and all. I wanted them to be like a native standing there and telling you about the place."
By the early 1950s, severe weathering of the signs compelled the department to begin routing the texts onto redwood boards. By 1952, the highway department had installed over one hundred markers along Montana's highways. Although Montana's historical highway marker program was not the first of its kind in the United States, it proved among the most influential. According to one newspaper article, twelve other state highway departments requested copies of the marker plans.
By the early 1980s, the interstates had diverted much of the traffic off the two-lane highways and onto the four-lane superhighways. Although some signs had been reinstalled at interstate rest areas, most had simply been forgotten, vandalized, stored in maintenance shops, or allowed to deteriorate next to bypassed highways. In 1985, the Forty-Ninth State Legislature allocated $200,000 to refurbish the 132 old markers (the original markers cost $400 each—including the support posts and field-stone bases!) and write twenty-four new ones.
Since 1985, over one hundred new historical markers have been added, covering a wide variety of subjects and styles. The markers have been printed on sturdy, weather-resistant plastic since 1999.
From the book Montana's Historical Highway Markers by the Montana Historical Society