Page 31 - Flathead Living Fall 2014

Hans and Hannah Thronson, a married Norwegian immigrant couple, arrived in Babb with their two sons at the tail end of World War I. Like many others at the time, they were drawn westward by the expansion of the Great Northern Railway. They worked odd jobs, such as cutting ice from nearby frozen lakes and selling it for refrigeration, before opening a general store in 1920. Four years later, they moved Babb H. Thronson & Son General Merchandise to the location where it still stands today.
Sherburne cites the Thronson mercantile as one of two general stores in those early years, though Babb’s two-shop arrangement would eventually dwindle to one. In addition to the store, the Thronson family opened the motel in the ‘50s and the café and gas sta- tion in the ‘60s. The antique store, run each summer by Debbie’s sister, is located in a building that once housed the earliest Thronsons, and it’s even older than the mercantile.
But once the Thronsons moved into a home attached to the back of the general store, they never moved again. Every Thronson to run the business has lived in that same house. The home has grown with renovations, but some original features such as the fireplace remain intact. Carved into the fireplace’s brickwork above the pit are the initials of two of the earliest Thronsons. While that relic is engraved in stone, another is planted
in soil: the 86-year-old cactus, greeting customers at the front door as it has for nearly a century.
Katrina and Cassy proudly point out the fireplace and cactus as two enduring symbols of family heri- tage. The young women know they are the ones who will decide whether those symbols continue to endure in their family name. They are the ones who will be responsible for pipes bursting in arctic winters amid 80-mile-per-hour winds, for making ends meet with brutally short business seasons, for keeping long-held traditions alive.
Barely into their 20s, they seem up to the task.
“We’re excited for it,” Katrina says. “This is what we’ve always known.”
Mike and Debbie took over the family business in 1989. Within the next few years, Katrina and Cassy were born. The sisters attended school 30 miles north in Cardston, Alberta. Families in and around Babb have the option of sending their kids to the Babb K-6 elementary, and Browning school system after that, or to Cardston.
Mike and Debbie would drive the girls to a bus sta- tion at the Canadian border, about halfway between Babb and Cardston, where a bus would pick them up and transport them the rest of the way. That was assuming they could first dig their way out of Babb’s wicked and frequent snowdrifts.
CloCKwise FroM top leFt
Looking south, U.S. Highway 89 curves through Babb.
Katrina Thronson, 23, left, and her sister Cassy Thronson, 21, pick a lunch to split during a quiet moment between customers at the Glacier’s Edge Cafe.
Motorcycles gas up at Thronson’s gas station tucked below the St. Mary Mission
and across from the Thronson’s General Store along U.S. Highway 89 in Babb.
FALL 2014 | FLATHEAD LIVING 29