According to the county's own web site, Liberty County was the first Montana county to be formed after World War I in 1919 with land taken from Choteau County (#19) and Hill County (# 12). Voters chose Chester as the county seat. Montana history claims otherwise, showing that the official date of county creation was February 11, 1920, after several other Montana counties came into being in 1919. It could of course be the case that the local election took place in 1919 and it took until the next year for the state legislature to approve the vote. Covering 1,458 square miles, Liberty County is predominately fueled by agriculture, with barley and wheat being the principal crops. The 2013 US Census estimate showed 2,369 residents, just a few less than the 1920, or first official census count of 2,416. Over the years, the population has remained relatively constant, which is highly unusual for a rural Montana county. The 1960 census counted 2,624 residents, the highest ever, and the 2000 census showed the lowest, 2,158. Long and narrow, the county reaches from the Canadian border on the north down into the Golden Triangle--Montana's premier wheat producing region. It is mostly rolling plains, although the Sweet Grass Hills in the north western part of the county reach 7,000 feet in elevation. U.S. Highway 2 crosses the county parallel to today's successor to the Great Northern Railroad, the line responsible for most of northern Montana's towns.
The Liberty County Courthouse
Chester, Montana
April 23rd, 2011
Chester, the County Seat, came into being with the coming of the Great Northern Railroad. The first local telegraph operator named the town in honor of his hometown on the Delaware River, Chester, Pennsylvania. Curiously, the original settlers of that part of Pennsylvania were "Swedes," or more likely Finns, as they named their new home Finlandia. (Finland was, at that time, a part of Sweden.) The ethnic make up of Liberty County shows that a large portion of the county claims Scandinavian heritage, and the largest group of Protestants in the county are members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, which traces its own heritage back to Scandinavia. Note that at some point, the members of the largest Lutheran Church in the county, Our Savior's, withdrew from the ELCA joining the more conservative Lutheran Congregations in Mission for Christ. The town was formally incorporated in 1910 and today remains the only incorporated community in the county. With a population of 847 (as of 2010), roughly one-third of the county residents live in the seat.
Welcome to Chester
Highway Sign on U.S. 2
April 23rd, 2011
Ten miles east of Chester on US Highway 2, and just west of the Hill County line, Joplin is a mere shadow of its former self. Dr. Carroll Van West, working for the Montana Historical Society, visited Joplin in the 1980s and again just a few years ago, and has written up quite a history of the town in his blog Revisiting Montana's Historic Landscape. He notes that two men are credited with the founding of the town, E. C. Tolley and Joseph E. Rehal, but apparently, as is so often the case, they were more in competition with each other than collaborators and the town grew in an "uneven and scattered" manner. The town grew quickly as the railroad advertised for settlers, but drought, freezing winters, and other catastrophes led to the population moving on, almost as quickly as they had come. At one time the town had a bank, a drugstore, hardware store, and of course the requisite school, bar and post office. Van West quotes Joplin resident Larry Olson telling how everything has changed in the seventy-two years he's lived in the area. "Nowadays, everything is closed up. You've got a [Lutheran] church and a bar--that's it." Well, not quite. The school closed in 2005 when the local school district merged with Chester's. But the Post Office still stands, as does the Community Center and park, and of course, the grain elevators.
Joplin Montana From US Highway 2
April 23rd, 2011
Thirteen miles west of Chester, just east of the Toole County (# 21) line, lies Lothair. I have not been able to find a reason for the name, even Roberta Carkeek Chaney in her Names on the Face of Montana says only that the town "is surrounded by promising oil and gas fields." She also notes that the post office was established in 1910. If I were to guess, I'd say that the community took its name from Benjamin Disraeli's novel Lothair which was quite popular around the turn of the last century, but is little known today. (Seems much more likely than naming a town for a Holy Roman Emperor, at least to me.) The grain elevators rising along the railroad tracks are about all that's left of Lothair, but Van West notes that back in 1918 the residents petitioned the railroad for a new depot, having lost their station to fire in 1912. The railroad never followed up on that petition, and the town withered away in short order.
South of Lothair lies Tiber Dam, blocking the flow of the Marias River and creating Lake Elwell or Tiber Reservoir. Built in the 1950s and rehabilited in the 1970s and 1980s, the dam is one of the largest earth-filled dams in the world, and has a 60 foot tall dike that is over three-miles long (17,000 feet). Lake Elwell is one of northern Montana's premier recreation areas, with 181 miles of shoreline and over 21,000 acres of water surface. It is also the location of the Lewis and Clark Overlook, commemorating the 1806 visit of Captain Meriwether Lewis as he returned home along the Marias River.
Our Savior's Lutheran Church
Chester, Montana
April 23rd, 2011
City-data.com indicates that 39% of Liberty County residents consider themselves to be of German heritage. The same site also indicates that 16% of county residents speak an Indo-European language, other than English, when at home. These two demographic statistics are most likely tied to the four (City-Data.com says two) Hutterite Colonies in Liberty County. The Hutterian Brethren are an Anabaptist sect, originally from modern day Austria. Persecuted for their beliefs, the Hutterites left Austria for Russia, and thence to North America where they settled in Montana, the Dakotas and the Canadian Province of Alberta. Practicing community ownership of all property (also called Christian Communism), and speaking a dialect of German amongst themselves, the Hutterites are prosperous and successful farmers. As all property is owned in common, the farmsteads are known as Colonies. The four Liberty County colonies are Sage Creek (in the northern part of the county) formed in 1960, Riverview (formed in 1980), Eagle Creek formed in 1982 (near Lothair), and Sunny Brook (formed in 2012). Because there are now over fifty Hutterite colonies in Montana, the State's Office of Public Instruction has put together a resource guide about these people, a group photographer Jill Brody describes as "Hidden in Plain Sight." The movie Holy Matrimony, filmed in Montana but ostensibly taking place in Alberta, is set on a Hutterite Colony and gives a relatively sympathetic look at Hutterian life.
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