THE CARROLL TRAIL
Businessmen in Montana Territory were always looking for ways to undercut their competitors. In 1874, the owners of the famed Diamond R Freighting Company tried to steal the lucrative steamboat trade from Fort Benton merchants by building a new port on the Missouri River near the mouth of the Musselshell. Named for Matt Carroll, the settlement was a crude collection of log huts perched on a cut bank overlooking the river. For the new settlement to be successful it needed a good road to connect it to the outside world
In 1873, the Diamond R blazed a 225-mile road to Carroll from Helena and the first freight train negotiated the trail to Carroll the following year. While one account claimed that the road had "plentiful supplies of wood and water," other travelers described a forbidding landscape of "little vegetation" that was "incapable of affording sustenance to man or beasts." When the road was dry, it took freight trains about a month to make the trip between Carroll and Helena. But when the road was wet it became a "greasy, slippery, fathomless mass of clinging mud, through which the straining animals [could] hardly drag the heavily-weighted wheels." Carroll failed to make money for the Diamond R and the company abandoned the post and the trail in 1876.
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
