Tag: ranch

Life in gardens: Birney, Montana

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Montana ranch garden seat, 1941, M. Wolcott, Library of Congress

“Dudes in a covered wagon garden seat,” Quarter Circle U Ranch, Birney, Montana, August 1941, by Marion Post Wolcott for the U.S. Farm Security Administration.

Montana ranch garden seat 2, 1941, M. Wolcott, Library of Congress

Both photos are via the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Wolcott had been charged with photographing the recovery of the western cattle industry. The Quarter Circle U ranch in Birney, Montana, like many others in the region, had begun entertaining dudes in the 1920s to augment ranch income, and so she photographed that side of the modern ranch business as well as cattle raising. The ranch scattered its grounds with covered wagon love seats designed for trysting young couples, many of whom purchased western wear as part of their Montana adventure.

— Mary Murphy, from “Romancing the West: Photographs by Marion Post Wolcott”

The Sunday porch: Montana

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W. C. Child Ranch, near Helena, Montana, ca. 1890,* from an Historic American Building Survey (HABS), via Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Mr. Child became rich from prospecting in Montana. He built this octagonal house on his 3,000-acre ranch in the late 1880s.

However, he used it not as a home, but as a party space.  (The whole second floor was a ballroom.) He and his friends — sometimes over 100 — would take the Northern Pacific train from nearby Helena for banquets and dances lasting late into the night.

By 1893, Child was broke and had to assign the ranch to another man.  He was found dead in the house a month later.

Child called the ranch “White Face Farm” for the Hereford cattle he raised there, and he built Montana’s largest barn to protect them during the winters. There are more details here.

The house and barn still exist as a special events center called Kleffner Ranch. *Both HABS pictures here were photocopies of original photographs; the originals are in the collection of the Historical Society of Montana.