McKennan Window - Helena, MT - Citizen Memorials on Waymarking.com

IN LOVING MEMORY OF
SAMUEL MCKENNAN • EDITH A MCKENNAN

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 7, 1933 SAMUEL McKENNAN
The death of Samuel McKennan calls attention to the great mortality among the men who helped make and finish off modern Montana. Many of them are yet in vigorous health, but those who have been taken away from us even in the last year, are numerous. While Mr. McKennan built up the Union Bank Trust company and made it one of the great financial institutions of Montana before the World war, he adapted himself to the new order of things, especially in the last few years, and those ranches, banks and business enterprises which he helped guide, kept on growing and expanding until the events beyond his control, brought some of them to a standstill.

But Mr. McKennan belonged to this era. He grew with the new ideas and methods. He was unafraid of the future here or hereafter. Probably no man in the banking business had a wider range of knowledge about the values and the possibilities of lands, livestock, dairy herds, wool clips and all of the many things which enter into the complex struggle which man must make to harness the forces of nature and get his living from land, sunshine and rain.

Coming to Montana from Minnesota, the center of an intensely developed agricultural area, Mr. McKennan became interested in encouraging diversified farming in this new agricultural principality; he was a great admirer and friend of the late James J. Hill, and he had Mr. Hill's enthusiasm for producing the best strains of livestock. He urged his many clients and customers to grow only the best and to reproduce only the purest blood strains in farm animals. What he did not know of the cattle business when he came to Montana as a comparatively young man, he learned from a long and close association with the late Conrad Kohrs, and the real cattle kings of Montana, Wyoming and Alberta, where he had intimate friends who spent their lives on the ranges.

Mr. McKennan, as the trusted banker and friend of many wealthy people, shaped their policies and many times their charities. When we look around the city of Helena, there are really a good many monuments to Samuel McKennan--monuments which but for a word from him, would probably never have been built. The man really loved this western country and the city of Helena. A few years ago he was offered the vice presidency of the First National bank in St. Paul, then controlled by the James J. Hill interests. Just a short time after he declined the place, it became a possibility that had he gone to St. Paul he would have been the head of the great Hill financial institution and its affiliates.

But Mr. McKennan never seriously considered leaving Helena and built here a beautiful residence for his permanent home. Besides the devoted care which he gave his family, Mr. McKennan was an ideal employer. His banking house was one big family affair, and everyone in it was either an associate or a young person whom he treated as he would his own sons. Mr. McKennan made a modest fortune by hard work and careful investments. Such fortunes as he controlled or helped to create, are possible only in a new country developing suddenly and rapidly. That development is near its close. Just as the pioneers who picked up nuggets of pure gold in Last Chance gulch from the top of the ground, are now followed by miners who find nothing but rocks, from which the gold must be extracted by hard labor and in small quantities, so the pioneers in banking and industry like Mr. McKennan, will be succeeded by men who have to be content with the refractory ores of financial and commercial enterprises. The death of Mr. McKennan is a distinct loss to the great banking interests with which he was affiliated, a loss to the city and to the state, as cool minds that can see into the mysterious years ahead are needed in hours like the present short span of eternity.
From The Helena Independent Record