Remember When?

 

November 29, 2018



50 YEARS AGO • DECEMBER 5, 1968

MUSEUM, AIRPORT GET TOP C. OF C. PRIORITIES

State Sen. Eugene H. Mahoney was elected president of the Thompson Falls-Noxon Chamber of Commerce at the annual banquet Monday night at the Thompson River Ranch.

In accepting the presidency, Mahoney said three projects which the chamber should work on in the future include construction of an airport at Noxon, a museum at Thompson Falls and improvements and additional deluxe facilities for Thompson Falls State Park.

D.J. Brockway in relinquishing his post told chamber members and visitors that a “museum is needed to preserve the history of the area. A museum would make one of the grandest assets we could accomplish for Thompson Falls.”

His museum remarks followed a talk by John Willard of Helena, author and manager of the Montana Railroad Assn., who described this area as one of the “most important from a standpoint of history in the entire Northwest.”

In relating the area’s early history, Willard described Thompson Falls’ namesake, David Thompson, fur trader, explorer and cartographer, as the “most prominent man in the area’s history. There is hardly a person in north America today who doesn’t owe a deep debt of gratitude to David Thompson,” Willard said.

The speaker called Bad Rock Mountain, located midway between Thompson Falls and Plains, “one of the most thoroughly cursed pieces of real estate in Northwestern Montana because of the hazards it presented to travelers along the Clark Fork River, until the Northern Pacific Railway Co. blasted a roadway through it.”

He said the Saleesh House built in the winter of 1809 at Thompson Falls as a fur trading post by Thompson was the “first roofed building in western Montana and possibly in the entire state. During the years that followed, practically everyone important in the fur trade in the Northwest stayed at the Saleesh House at one time or another.”

Willard said Weeksville was described in Winser’s “Guide to the N.P. Railroad” as “one of the West’s most horrible places. Many bodies, Chinese and white, were thrown into the Clark Fork River. Weeksville is noted for its drinking dens and gambling halls of the worst sort, where murder was often the ending of affrays.” Vigilantes eventually cleaned up Weeksville.

The gold rush into the Coeur d’Alenes and the arrival of the railroad were labeled events which really got Thompson Falls started.

“Then when the town of Belknap burned down and the remainder of its citizens moved up river to Thompson Falls, the town’s future was assured.” At one time, Belknap had a population of 5,000.

It wasn’t until 1981 when a museum in Thompson Falls materialized. After the current Sanders County Sheriff’s Office & Jail was constructed the commissioners were considering tearing down the old jail facility and turning it into a parking lot. A group of concerned citizens persuaded the commissioners to let them use the building as a museum. It is now called the Old Jail Museum and contains archives and mementos from the past.

40 YEARS AGO •

NOVEMBER 30, 1978

OPEN HOUSE SET

FOR SYLVIA SAINT

An open house Saturday morning at the Thompson Falls Post Office will honor the retirement of Mrs. Sylvia Saint, whose last day of work will be Friday.

Sylvia began work with the Post Office in May 1968 under the late Postmaster N.J. “Frenchy” LaFriniere. Previously she had been employed by the First State Bank and also helped her husband, Bob, run the service station they owned and a dry cleaning plant. This building now houses Genki Café. The gas pumps were on the cement apron in front of the building, cars turned off Main St. and pulled up to the pumps to get gas. The dry cleaning plant was in the east side of the building.

Mrs. Saint was born in Stevensville, after school she went to work as a telephone operator until her marriage to H. Robert Saint in 1938. Except for a time while Bob was employed in a clothing store at Ft. Benton, they have spent most of their married life in Thompson Falls.

They have two children, a son, Bill, is employed in the Post Office here, and a daughter, Inez who resides at La Luz, New Mexico. Sylvia has a brother, Dave Grant, who resides in Thompson Falls also.

 

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