They say life is like a box of chocolates; you never know what you’re going to get. Spend a few minutes perusing the displays at the Columbia Falls Historical Society museum, and you might say the same about it. After all, where else would you find a pen that’s been to the moon and back, and the brochure from the Columbia Falls High School band’s trip to Europe in 1970?
That variety is one of the reasons people love visiting the small museum along U.S. Highway 2 in Columbia Falls, said Peg Sorensen, the chairperson of the historical society and one of the regular volunteers who welcomes visitors.
“We want to share a little bit of everything,” Sorensen said on a rainy afternoon in early March. “There’s just so much great history here.”
The Columbia Falls Historical Society was established in 2008, mostly as a loosely organized group of locals interested in the history of Columbia Falls and the surrounding area, including Glacier National Park, the Bob Marshall Wilderness, and some nearby communities. Sorensen said the group started meeting at the A&W on occasion and went around town gathering up artifacts important to local history. One of the group’s biggest finds came when the old Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. plant closed down. After several years, the group had a few storage units full of material but no place to share it with the public. That was until 2022, when they secured a small space in the basement of a building downtown. It wasn’t much, but Sorensen said it was enough to get their feet under themselves.
In early 2025, the group began actively seeking a new space and soon found a storefront right along the highway, which had until recently been home to Sundrop Health Foods. Over the summer, the group packed up their basement museum and headed down the road to the larger space. By early fall, the new museum was open for business, Wednesday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Sorensen said while there are still artifacts hidden away in storage, volunteers have tried to display a little bit of everything, covering everything from local schools to Glacier National Park. One of the biggest is dedicated to the former aluminum company, which operated from 1955 until 2009. There are photos of past workers, models of what the plant looked like inside, and a commemorative pen that CFAC had made to be brought aboard the Apollo 8 mission in December 1968 (while Apollo 8 didn’t land on the moon — that would happen seven months later in July 1969 — it was the first crewed spacecraft to leave Earth’s gravitational sphere of influence, and the first human spaceflight to reach the Moon, which they orbited 10 times before coming home).
Another exhibit features the work of local journalism legend Mel Ruder. Ruder was born in 1915, graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1942, and served during World War II before, in 1946, moving to Columbia Falls to found the Hungry Horse News. The newspaper, still in print today, became known for its coverage of local happenings, particularly around Glacier. It was especially revered for Ruder’s photography. The paper’s biggest moment came in 1965, when Ruder won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the previous year’s flooding that ravaged the region. A copy of the Pulitzer is on display, along with two of Ruder’s typewriters and one of his cameras.
Other displays focus on the Back Country Horsemen, the Izaak Walton Inn, the logging industry and more. For more information about the Columbia Falls Historical Society, visit their website at columbiafallshistoricalsociety.org or call (406) 249-8198. The museum is located along U.S. Highway 2, next to Dairy Queen.