Kalispell

The Park Between the Mountains

Kalispell stands in the Flathead Valley, with the Whitefish Range on the north and the Swan Range rising sheer on the east.^1,4 In time the city became the trade and financial center of the Flathead Valley.⁴ In 1939 the Federal Writers’ Project guide wrote that the Salishan tribes called the valley “the park between the mountains” and that no white man came there until David Thompson explored it in 1809.¹ The guide said the valley could be reached only by hazardous travel over the old Tobacco Plains Trail, so no one settled there permanently until 1881, and its only trading points had been Angus McDonald’s Hudson’s Bay Co. post and the post office at Dooley’s Landing on the Flathead River.¹

Collapsetown on the Great Northern

As the Great Northern Railway built west from St. Paul to Seattle, the towns of the Flathead Valley competed to become its division point.² In the spring of 1891 railroad officials bought land from the Reverend George Fisher and other early residents and platted a new town in “T-town” form, with Main Street running perpendicular to one side of the proposed tracks.² People who doubted that the railroad would ever reach the place called it “Collapsetown” and “Wait a Spell,” but lots still sold for as much as $1,250.² Businessmen at Demersville, a steamboat landing on the Flathead River, put their buildings on log rollers and hauled them to the new town, and the 1939 guide says the settlement of Ashley, 0.5 mile west, was moved as well.^1,3 The sources give different distances for the haul: the historic district nomination says four miles, a Main Street building history says three, and the 1939 guide puts Demersville 4.5 miles southeast.^1,2,3 The Kalispell Graphic reported that the tracklayers reached Kalispell late on the day before the celebration and that the first Great Northern locomotive whistled in town at 6:37 that evening.⁴ On New Year’s Day in 1892, 3,500 people gathered at the tracks in the center of town under banners that read “Kalispell and St. Paul United by Steel,” and “beer and whiskey were as free as the fresh air.”^2,4 “The iron horse has at last snorted in the Garden of Eden of Montana,” the Graphic wrote.⁴

Courthouse, Panic, and the Lost Division Point

Kalispell was incorporated in 1892 and became county seat in 1893, the year the lawyer Sidney M. Logan was appointed first commissioner of the new Flathead County; he later served as mayor in 1903.⁴ The Reverend George M. Fisher organized the town’s Presbyterian congregation in 1891 with 17 members and in 1892 built Kalispell’s first church, putting the valley’s first bell in its steeple.⁵ A stone foundation laid on a corner in what is now the Kalispell Main Street Historic District in 1892 stood unfinished, likely because of the Panic of 1893, and an 1894 map still showed the building in progress.⁶ The county court and offices used its second story from 1895 to 1903, when the Flathead County Courthouse went up half a mile from the depot at the other end of Main Street, a site one critic called a “monumental blunder.”^6,7 In 1904 the Great Northern moved its division point to Whitefish, and the town paused long enough that construction stopped on at least one new building, yet Kalispell continued to prosper.^2,3 Homesteading, the lumber industry, and tourism made it a trade, financial, and service center, and in 1939 the guide counted 6,094 people and said the Flathead country produced 40 percent of Montana’s lumber.^1,2

Brick Blocks on Main Street

Main Street’s first wooden frame buildings soon had brick neighbors, among them the Brewery Saloon, which in 1894 served draft beer at five cents a glass.^2,8 The German immigrants Charles and Henry Lindlahr owned the saloon along with the Kalispell Malting and Brewing Company; by 1919 new owners had renamed it The Palm, and it survived Prohibition by selling fishing and smoking supplies, candy, and fountain drinks.⁸ The Missoula Mercantile moved onto the first floor of the once-stalled corner building, and by 1897 its Kalispell branch employed twenty men and delivered by train as far as Havre.⁶ The architect Marion Riffo designed the three-story Kalispell Hotel, which opened in 1912 at $2 a night, and the Montana author Frank Linderman managed it from 1924 to 1926.⁹

Library, Courthouse District, and Warehouse

The library that Andrew Carnegie helped pay for opened on January 12, 1904, served the town until 1969, and then became the Hockaday Center for the Arts.¹⁰ The district around the courthouse was built up between 1927 and 1941, and the local architect Fred Brinkman designed many of its buildings; he also designed the present First Presbyterian Church, which the long-retired Reverend Fisher dedicated in 1927.^5,7 On Main Street, buildings by the architects Marion Riffo, Fred Brinkman, and George Shanley stand among a larger number of plain commercial blocks put up by local masons and contractors.² In 1914 the Elliott brothers, merchants from Minnesota, built a two-story brick wholesale grocery warehouse beside the Great Northern tracks and shipped local potatoes out by rail.¹¹ The tracks and the loading platform are gone, but the warehouse still stands.¹¹