Heatherington Boarding House - Bridger, MT - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

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Heatherington Boarding House - Bridger, MT

in U.S. National Register of Historic Places

Posted by:  T0SHEA

12T E 663716 N 5017938

One of the few buildings remaining from a town known as "Stringtown" this was the first boardinghouse to be erected in what is now Bridger.

Today just another nondescript two story house lining East Broadway, the Heatherington Boarding House is, if nothing else, a survivor. While almost all of its original neighbors have long since disappeared, it stands here still, a reminder of the pioneering days of a company coal town. Like all other buildings in the town at the time, this boarding house was built on what turned out to be company owned land, the company being the Bridger Coal and Improvement Company, formed by one of Butte's copper kings, W.A. Clark, when he discovered coal in the area. After a 1900 survey showed that the building was on company land, it was moved to its present location. Thereafter the Heatheringtons were able to purchase their lot from the company.

The Heatherington Boarding House was built by Charles and Grace Heatherington, who had come to Carbon County in 1894, settling in the vicinity of what became Bridger some six years later. Charles operated Bridger's first livery business, ran a stage line, and harvested ice from the Clark's Fork River. Also a prospector, this line of work produced only misfortune for the Heatheringtons, with Grace and Charles both being bitten by ticks and contracting Spotted Fever, from which Grace died.

Many years later, in 1935, Charles and others, all early-day pioneers, erected a monument in City Park to the memory of the town's name sake, Jim Bridger.

HEATHERINGTON BOARDING HOUSE

The coal found near here so impressed Butte’s William A. Clark that he formed a company to mine it two miles west of the center of present-day Bridger. The company town he began in 1898 included boarding houses and family housing, a school, and a general store. But miners and their paychecks soon attracted other entrepreneurs, even though the only land available was the county road right-of-way. Undaunted, they built saloons and shops end to end on the narrow strip, forming “Stringtown,” where a person could walk out one building’s back door and into the next one’s front. Charles A. and Grace Heatherington built this boarding house in Stringtown in 1899, providing the only housing besides a hotel for new arrivals not employed by the mine. Charles, known as “Curley,” also operated a livery and ran the stage line that brought Bridger’s mail from Red Lodge—and, in summer, he sold ice cut from the Clark’s Fork. When Bridger townsite was surveyed in 1900, Heatherington was among many Stringtowners who moved their buildings here, and he continued to operate the boarding house. Today, this is one of very few buildings surviving from the original settlement.
From the NRHP plaque at the building