Travelers in Montana get an occasional glimpse of an aging homestead cabin along a mountain road or beside a wheat field. Mostly they see a building that is losing its battle against gravity.
Michael Ley sees far more. He sees story-telling architecture from the homestead era, an architecture that is slipping away forever.
“So many are being lost, they’re being torn down, burned down and just falling down. I wondered how to preserve the history of these things other than in a photograph. What would be a different medium?” the man who lives with his family in Montana’s Bears Paw Mountains said.
That’s when it came to him. He would build a replica homestead to scale.
An academic counselor who works as a carpenter in the summer, Ley set to work with confidence. It was painstaking work, but the favorable comments that the first building drew encouraged him to build another.
Fifteen years later, Ley is still building homestead-era replicas with a scale of about 1:20, and he’s just as intrigued by homestead architecture as ever.
And what replicas they are! Ley cuts over 3,000 pieces for each one, fashioning them into marvelously detailed buildings complete with such touches as a hitching rail or a stack of wood alongside.
People who see one for the first time invariably ask about the shingles. Are they all individual pieces? You bet.
In spite of their hefty price tag, Don Sorenson is so impressed with the models that he carries them at his Mercantile in Virgelle. They make a meaningful souvenir for travelers who have spent the night in one of Sorenson’s renovated homestead cabins. “The detail is quite exquisite. The time he spends!” said Sorenson, shaking his head with amazement.
Ley has made models of two of Sorenson’s buildings, Sheepherder Cabin and Geiser Homestead.
Ley aims for nothing less than perfection in his structures, and it shows in the meticulous fit of the pieces. He said the most difficult part was figuring out how to carve the chimney so that it looks like bricks.
Montana’s biggest influx of homesteaders was from 1908 to 1918, Ley said. To acquire 320 acres of free land under homestead laws loosened in 1909 and 1912, settlers had to live on their acreage for three years and cultivate crops. Typically they hastily threw together a shack in a few days at most, then got busy digging a well and cultivating.
A year or more later, with income from a crop or two, they would build a house that was larger and intended to last. These would have such amenities as a cookstove and a loft, the warmest spot in the house where the children slept. These are the houses that fascinate Ley.
Each building he has made is a copy of a real one, though sometimes the actual structure was gone and he worked from photographs.
He currently offers seven Beaver Creek “Old Places,” as he calls his endeavor. There is the Birch Creek School House, for instance, which he did from photos. Ley hasn’t been past the McFallen Place or Ichina Sheep Ranch in a few years, but believes they still stand. Sheep Ranch on Cow Creek also remains, as does Nevada City Storefront, part of a ghost town in the southwestern part of the state. The Williamson Place on Camp Creek and the 1914 Homestead have burned down.
Fire was a hazard even in the days of the homesteaders. Stoves in the uninsulated houses blazed away at maximum capacity when winter temperatures dropped to 30 degrees below zero or more. Most of the house would still be quite cold, but the area nearest the stove might get so hot that it caught fire.
Today intentional fire also threatens homesteads. Farmers and ranchers must pay taxes on all the buildings on their property, so many of them have torn down or burned the homesteads to keep their property taxes more manageable. “It’s a wonder any of them have survived,” Ley commented.
He leans forward and speaks a little faster, his 20-year passion for the homesteading era shining through, when he describes how just-right circumstances brought homesteaders flooding to Montana for a decade.
For example, James J. Hill’s Great Northern Railway needed a population to serve. The railroad led promoters with a barrage of activity, advertising widely and sponsoring farm exhibits to show prospective homesteaders how fine the land was.
“An ad that I remember from my research is a painting of a plow turning dirt over and it coming from the blade as a pile of coins,” Ley said.
New dryland farming methods and a belief that plowing the prairies and planting them with green crops and trees would cause cooler air that permanently increased rainfall was another plus. “The rain follows the plow,” was a common saying then. And indeed rain came more often to the prairie during the decade from 1910 to 1920.
Along with the unusually high rainfall and the more generous homesteading terms came high prices for crops as Europe imported food during World War I.
But the tide turned suddenly. Rainfall didn’t come, and prices for grain fell. The war was over and by 1920 Europe could feed itself again. Year after year, the crops failed and one-time homesteaders departed for other states, leaving behind their homes.
The truth was becoming clear. On Montana’s prairies, few years see enough moisture to support a family on a mere 320 acres.
When a homesteader went bust and moved on, another homesteader who was left behind would move the vacant building to his own land by horse and skid, adding it onto his place to make a larger house. “It speaks a lot of the desperation for houses,” Ley said.
Combined houses are the sort of thing Ley notices as he drives by decaying buildings. A rarer find that he spotted was an original tarpaper shack made from a kit that the homesteader brought along. True to form, it had one window and one door. It was being used as a tool shed.
“When I came here from Indiana 30 years ago there were still enough homesteads around and you could see the different steps they took to upgrade their buildings,” Ley said. As a builder with an eye for architecture, he was fascinated by the simple, rugged forms.
In addition to reading, Ley has talked with oldtimers and researchers to learn more. He recalls flying over land to the north of Chinook one day with a homestead researcher, looking for foundations from the air. “You should see all the foundations out there!” he exclaimed.
Ley passed along a tip for finding homestead foundations from the ground. Sometimes it’s easier to look for the rhubarb and horseradish — still thriving 85 to 95 years later — than to look for the foundations of buildings.
From the outset Ley has used weathered wood, gathered from original farm and ranch structures for his material. Sometimes it’s from the place with the building he’s imitating.
Another feature he has kept is the use of a knothole in each building. The first replica he built was not only a homestead, it was also a bird feeder. Pouring seed in the chimney would dispense it under the porch. But he learned that birds, other animals and the weather are much too hard on them. Still, he wanted to appeal to bird house collectors.
“Now the knothole is a signature. I try to put one somewhere in all of them,” he said.
Buyers are a varied lot. They include someone who bought the replica schoolhouse to mark a teaching friend’s retirement, buyers at charity auctions, and one purchased by the grandson of a homesteader for his mother.
Ley finds that people who lived during the homestead era often would like to forget those days. The ones who are left were children then, but they recall being at the mercy of blizzards, hail, and grasshoppers, and hauling water for miles. “Those were hard days. There was nothing glamorous about it,” they tell him.
Homesteaders were gutsy people and hard workers, Ley said. Many came from Europe through Ellis Island, then got on a train to Havre, Montana.
Ley is included in “Hands of Harvest,” a rural trail highlighting the crafts heritage of north central Montana. The over a hundred places to visit focus on authentic, quality crafts and craftspersons, as well as cultural sites such as small-town museums. Unique lodgings, such as Sorenson’s, are also listed.
“Each person on the loop has a passion,” said Hands of Harvest Project Coordinator Vicki Warp. “In Michael Ley’s case, his passion truly is trying to keep this part of history alive.”
For more information on Beaver Creek Old Places contact Ley at HC 30, Box 349, Havre, MT 595011; phone 406-395-4725; or visit http://havremt.com/oldplaces on the web.
For more information about the Hands of Harvest, contact Cascade County Extension Service, 1807 3rd St. NW, Great Falls, MT 59404, call 406-454-6980 or visit www.handsofharvest.org.