Deer Lodge, Montana, United States
Deer Lodge is one of those confusing names in these parts
since the town of Deer Lodge is the seat of Powell County but Anaconda is the
seat of Deer Lodge County. Overall Deer Lodge is a town that looks like its
seen better days. The historical museum displays pictures of a busy downtown
Main Street lined with stores and diagonally parked vehicles from perhaps the
1920s or 1930s, but nowadays most of the downtown businesses have gone and
activity clusters around the Interstate exit. Census data shows the county has had
a stable population around 7,000 give or take for about the last 100 years, but
some share of those are inmates at the state’s prison, located near Deer Lodge
town.
I stopped in Deer Lodge back in 2012 to check out
Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, but it was winter and nothing was
open. All I could do was walk around the grounds briefly. The sire is part of
the National Park Service system and commemorates the history of the open range
of the late 1800s up until the hard winter of 1886-87 when many ranch
operations were put out of business due to cattle losses and things started
becoming more fenced in with hay grown for winter feed.
The Kohrs Ranch site is
a small remnant of what was once one of the largest cattle raising operations
in the West. There are a few historical displays and a guided tour of the ranch
house, which is pretty nice but doesn’t allow pictures.
Deer Lodge’s second main attraction is the Old Montana
Prison Museum, the state’s prison up until 1979 when a new larger facility was
built farther from town. The tour is self-guided and actually quite
interesting. Most of the prisons I’ve toured were more modern operational ones
when I specialized in criminal justice analysis and forecasting for the Colorado
General Assembly in my first years out of graduate school in the mid-1990s. The cell blocks at the old Montana penitentiary
look quite like something out of Alcatraz. Your admission ticket actually gets you into all
units of a five museum complex that includes the Montana Automobile Museum,
Powell County History Museum, Frontier Museum, and an Antique Toy Museum as
well as the prison. The remaining three are quite small but the Montana
Automobile Museum is surprisingly large with a huge number of classic cars from
the early days of the automobile up through about the 1970s. I haven’t seen so many classic American cars
from the 1950s since I was in Cuba two years ago!
2025-05-22