GARNET – We’re coming up on ghost season here in these rugged mountains, where winter is reputedly the best time to hear the tinkling of piano keys where there are no pianos or to see white-haired Frank Davey in a three-piece suit outside his general store.
Davey died in 1947.
Some things never change in Montana’s best-preserved ghost town, one so steeped in mining and social history, and one presumably so well-documented over the decades that its place on the National Historic Register is set in architecturally correct granite.
Or not.
“When I started up here as ranger five years ago, I assumed it was listed,” Allan Mathews of Missoula said. “Now I know why it wasn’t. It’s probably the toughest nomination I’ve ever done.”
After nearly a quarter of century of trying, the Bureau of Land Management’s Missoula field office recently received the good news from the Keeper of the National Register of Historic Places:
Garnet is officially on the list.
Gold was discovered and mined here first in Montana’s earliest gold rush period in the mid-1860s. Placer mining petered out, but by 1898 some 1,000 people lived in and around the town that now boasted a stamp mill and a newly found vein of rich ore.
That dwindled to 150 seven years later after the mines played out, and a fire in 1912 destroyed a large swath of the business district. Things picked up again during the Great Depression when President Franklin Roosevelt doubled the price of gold to $32 an ounce as part of a stimulus package.
By the late 1940s, Garnet was officially a ghost town, but many buildings and a few residents remained. The population picked up a bit during the commune period of the 1960s, but by the ’70s it was clear to the BLM that effort and money were needed to prevent the town from rotting into history.
In 1987, the BLM contracted with archaeologist Jerry Clark to compile a nomination to the State Historic Preservation Office, or SHPO (say “Shippo.”)
“They sent back two pages of things that should be done — further investigations and history clarifications and things like that,” Mathews said. “They (the BLM) just didn’t have the staff to deal with it. Finally they started working on it again, it must have been eight or nine years ago, and the same thing happened.”
Mathews, who was hired early last year as historian at BLM and was immediately immersed in the latest nomination effort, said the SHPO review of the early 2000s was daunting.
“You looked at it and you go, Oh, my god, this is going to take forever to answer all those questions and find this information that’s so hard to find,’ ” he said.
In an effort spearheaded by Mathews and BLM archaeologist Maria Craig, the successful nomination included no fewer than 183 contributing features, and many others that nonetheless had to be documented. Buildings and trash dumps, mine pits, shafts and adits …
“Just about everything that had to do with the mining history of the town,” said Mathews, whose job it was to revise and write the historical information for the nomination. “Here’s a depression in the ground with a few logs in it, it’s counted like a site and you have to document it, measure it, and try to figure out how it would have fit into the history.”
Craig, from the BLM’s Missoula field office, oversaw the nuts and bolts of the nomination, including the collection of maps and photos both old and new.
Craig said at one point the state office sent back a draft and wondered if Sanborn fire insurance maps, so valuable in the historic documentation of other towns, weren’t available for Garnet.
“There were no early maps at all,” she said. “We have recollections from people whose parents lived here and this and that, what the streets and buildings looked like. But it’s like, well, what decade was that?”
While photographs exist of downtown Garnet over the years, other parts of town are frustratingly absent, just beyond the edge of the photo, Craig said.
Buildings were called by different names over the decades. Bottle hunters hit the trash dumps hard, and residents from several different generations threw their garbage there, making those sites difficult to interpret.
“You had the revival in the 1930s, but you also had kind of the hippie thing in the ’60s, so it’s very hard to tell where something came from unless it’s buried deep enough,” Mathews said.
Mathews and Craig credited John Boughton of SHPO with helping steer the ultimate nomination through.
“It makes a big difference who you’re working with,” Mathews said.
“The nominations are difficult to write, and over time the nomination process has gotten more arduous,” Boughton said. “Twenty years ago it was probably easier to get a project like this listed.”
On a chilly Monday morning, Nick Leritz and Bob Monsour were busy shoring up the uphill side of the Hawe House, a 1930s vintage home on the south edge of town.
The two are “on loan” to BLM from Glacier National Park, where they spend summers working on restoration projects. For the last several Septembers, they’ve worked on preservation projects at Garnet.
It’s part of the BLM’s ongoing plan to keep Garnet standing up, if not always perfectly straight. And like the town’s ghosts, change is always in the air.
A tree thinning project completed last year opened the hillside vistas around town and allowed for construction of an interpretive trail, 1 1/2 miles in length, that circles the gulches north of Garnet and ends at the visitor center.
The old-time swing at Warren Park, Garnet’s hidden jewel, was restored to safe, swingable form last summer by Monsour and Leritz. The open hillside playground, a 1 1/2-mile walk from the Garnet parking lot above town, was built sometime around the turn of the 20th century by a bachelor who longed for the company of townfolk on their way to his park.
“That’s what’s great about this place – every year you can access more and more of these places,” Mathews said. “Ten years ago you couldn’t get into hardly any of the hotel rooms. They stabilized the ice house last year in Davey’s store, and now that’s a very cool place to go into. People love that.”
The National Register listing verifies the historic authenticity and feel that Garnet visitors and caretakers have long enjoyed. Now it lends an extra layer of recognition that should be embraced by a larger segment of the population.
“People love ghost towns,” Mathews said. “They come from all over the world and that’s what they do – go from ghost town to ghost town. And Garnet is definitely one of the nicest.”