From Stone and Steeple:

The History of Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana

Origins in the Territory: The Montana Collegiate Institute and Its Successors

Before Montana was a state, and before Billings had been incorporated as a town, the seeds of what would become Rocky Mountain College were planted some two hundred miles to the west. In 1878, a group of civic-minded residents of Deer Lodge established the Montana Collegiate Institute, the first institution of higher learning in the Montana Territory. Eleven years before statehood, Deer Lodge became home to Montana’s first postsecondary school: the nonsectarian, coeducational college offered both high school classes and a classical graduating course described as comprehensive and thorough as that of most seminaries and female colleges of its era.  The school’s first permanent structure, Trask Hall, was constructed in 1878 for approximately $13,000, using locally quarried granite and bricks imported from Helena. 

The school’s early years were financially precarious. It closed after only a year of operation before being acquired by the Presbyterian Church. Nationally, Presbyterians saw the college as part of their campaign to civilize and Christianize the West, and a generous East Coast donor, Alanson Trask, paid the school’s remaining $6,000 debt.  Renamed the College of Montana in 1883, the institution at its peak boasted 15 faculty and 160 students, housed in two dormitories. Among the faculty was Theodore Brantly, who became chief justice of the Montana Supreme Court upon statehood.  Still, competition from the newly established state university system proved fatal. The school closed in 1900, unable to compete with the new, state-funded university system. It reopened under different management in 1906 only to close for good in 1917. 

Meanwhile, in Helena, a parallel institution had taken root. Founded under Methodist affiliation in 1888, Montana Wesleyan University was situated just outside of Helena before a permanent campus was erected near the state capitol. The school underwent a number of expansions before merging with the Presbyterian College of Montana in 1923, forming Intermountain Union College.  This new consolidated institution held dual denominational sponsorship and occupied the former Wesleyan campus near the state capitol building. It was a short-lived arrangement. The campus closed after it was damaged by the 6.2 magnitude Helena Earthquake of 1935. 

The Polytechnic Experiment: Lewis Eaton and the Billings Campus

While the Deer Lodge and Helena institutions followed their difficult trajectories, a separate institution was taking shape on the rimrock plateau overlooking the young city of Billings. Billings Polytechnic Institute was founded by brothers Lewis and Ernest Eaton with the support of the Congregational Church. Described as a “practical industrial school for the Northwest,” Billings Polytechnic began classes in 1910.  Lewis Eaton was not a newcomer to Montana higher education; he had previously served as president of the College of Montana in Deer Lodge, and he applied lessons from that experience to his new venture. In 1908, the brothers moved to Billings and established the Billings Polytechnic Institute, using the same blend of practicality, cultural arts, and civic and religious training of youth in its curriculum. 

The campus that emerged on the plateau between Poly Drive and Rimrock Road was unlike any other in Montana. Students received a practical education as they operated a dairy farm, a produce garden, a small refinery, and a milling company which produced cereals and pancake flour. These operations provided fresh vegetables, fruit, eggs, milk, cream, and butter for the dormitories.  The school’s physical plant was similarly a product of student labor. Students were involved in the building of the Polytechnic campus, digging sandstone from the Rimrock to construct the buildings, the work being part of their college tuition. By the 1930s, the campus consisted of nine buildings, all sandstone. 

This model of student-built infrastructure left a visible and lasting legacy. Prescott Hall, completed in 1916 and named for a New York patron, was built mostly by student labor with sandstone from the school’s quarry. Construction was directed by a stone mason and the instructor of industrial arts.  The building later served as a dining hall and housed a cereal milling operation in its basement, where the Green and Gold Milling Company began operating in 1932, producing flour and cereal distributed throughout Montana and Wyoming. Prescott Hall was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on April 30, 1982, and stands today as a direct material remnant of the polytechnic experiment. By the 1920s, students could master a trade while earning money at the campus dairy farm, grain fields, cereal mill, stone quarry, machine shop, or gardens, producing their own food for the cafeteria. 

The campus also attracted notable outside investment. James J. Hill contributed $25,000 toward land to expand the campus and get it out of Billings. Theodore Roosevelt said of the school, “This is the kind of school that builds character and trains for the highest type of leadership.”  Whether or not such endorsements reflected substantive engagement with the institution, they illustrate the degree to which Billings Polytechnic had, by the early twentieth century, attracted the attention of national figures interested in the development of the American West.

The first classes were held not on campus but in borrowed Billings spaces. In 1909, while the first buildings on the Billings Polytechnic Institute campus were still under construction, the college’s first classes were held in two downtown buildings, including the Parmly Billings Library, now home to the Western Heritage Center.  Eaton Hall, opened in 1909 as the Science Hall, was a gift of local businessmen and remains the oldest standing structure on what is now the Rocky Mountain College campus, today serving as the administration building.

Earthquake and Consolidation: The Path to Rocky Mountain College

The 1935 Helena earthquakes that destroyed Intermountain Union College’s campus set in motion the final chapter of institutional consolidation. After a brief period in Great Falls, Intermountain Union College accepted an invitation to relocate on the campus of Billings Polytechnic Institute, which had merged with the Billings Business College in 1927. As affiliates, the institutions developed integrated programs and then merged into a single college in 1939, later renamed Rocky Mountain College in 1947 by student vote. 

The renaming in 1947 was itself significant. Rather than accepting a name assigned by trustees or administrators, students petitioned for and won the designation Rocky Mountain College. The students petitioned to rename BPI to Rocky Mountain College. They also took it upon themselves to accelerate the expansion of the College, and they even constructed the new buildings as a way of paying for their tuition.  The new name discarded the institutional identities of all three predecessor schools while gesturing toward the regional geography that united them.

The product of the merger of three institutions, Rocky Mountain College has as its heritage both liberal arts and polytechnic roots.  It is affiliated today with three Protestant denominations — the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church (USA), and the United Church of Christ — a direct inheritance of the Methodist and Presbyterian lineages of its precursor institutions. This tripartite denominational affiliation is unusual in American higher education and reflects the ecumenical spirit of consolidation that produced the college. In practice, the college describes itself as non-sectarian in its intellectual and campus culture, welcoming students of all faith traditions.

Campus Architecture as Historical Record

For the historian, the Rocky Mountain College campus functions as a kind of built archive. The sandstone structures that define its character were quarried by students from the Rimrocks overlooking the campus, worked under the direction of tradesmen, and funded through a combination of distant philanthropy and local enterprise. Eaton Hall (1909), named for the founding brothers, anchors the campus at its oldest corner. Kimball Hall, the earliest women’s dormitory, was completed in 1914 and was financed substantially by Martha Kimball of New Hampshire. Losekamp Hall, a four-story Gothic sandstone structure completed in 1919, was built in memory of Billings merchant John Losekamp and houses the music and theatre programs. Technology Hall (1922), still in active use, follows the same sandstone vocabulary. Alden Hall (1937), the last major sandstone structure built before the postwar period, was made possible by a gift from the Alden Trust of Worcester, Massachusetts, and originally served as a men’s dormitory.

Many campus buildings are comprised of sandstone rocks, quarried from the Rimrocks during the College’s formative years.  This architectural uniformity, the product of economic necessity and the polytechnic philosophy of learning through labor, gives the campus a visual coherence unusual among small American colleges. During World War II the campus served an unexpected purpose: in late 1944, the commons area served meals to over 300 Italian and German prisoners of war that were housed on campus.  This episode, rarely noted in institutional histories, points to the ways in which even small regional colleges were drawn into the logistical demands of the war effort.

Programs and Academic Identity in the Postwar Era

In the postwar decades, Rocky Mountain College developed the academic profile that distinguishes it today. The college has maintained a commitment to undergraduate education grounded in the liberal arts while expanding into professional programs that serve the specific needs of the intermountain West. Two programs in particular set it apart from comparable small liberal arts institutions elsewhere in the country.

The aviation program has deep historical roots on the campus. The first documented connection between aviation and the College was in 1931 when several faculty members’ children living on campus built a replica of Charles Lindbergh’s famous Spirit of St. Louis airplane from scrap lumber. Charles Lindbergh had lived in Billings in the mid-1920s while working as an airplane mechanic at the Billings Airport, located just above campus on the Rimrocks.  A more formal connection came through federal wartime policy: in 1939, the U.S. Congress passed the Civilian Pilot Training Act, which provided federal funds for colleges to train pilots in the event the country went to war. The College signed a contract with the Civil Aeronautics Administration to train up to 30 pilots each quarter.  The formal aviation degree program grew out of these wartime roots, and by 1990 had expanded to include multiple accredited majors. In 1999 the two majors were renamed aeronautical science and aviation management, as they remain today. The program has been a member of the Aviation Accreditation Board International since 1997, with both majors accredited by AABI in 2009.  Flight operations are now conducted at Billings Logan International Airport, a short distance above the campus on the rimrock plateau — a geographic adjacency that has defined the aviation program’s character from the outset.

The Physician Assistant Studies program addresses a different but equally pressing regional need. Rocky Mountain College’s 26-month Master of Physician Assistant Studies degree prepares students to provide evidence-based, compassionate care across primary care and advanced specialties, especially in rural and underserved areas of the intermountain West.  Montana’s vast geography and sparse population create persistent shortfalls in healthcare access, particularly in frontier and tribal communities. Sixty percent of graduates accept positions at sites where they completed clinical experiences,  a statistic that reflects a deliberate program design oriented toward placing providers where the need is greatest. Full accreditation for the Physician Assistant Program was first awarded in October 1998, and the program holds active accreditation from the Accreditation Review Commission on Education for the Physician Assistant.

Current Profile and Regional Significance

Rocky Mountain College today enrolls approximately 924 students, a figure that places it among the smallest accredited four-year colleges in the Pacific Northwest region. It maintains a student-to-faculty ratio of 12:1 and, according to recent institutional data, provides financial aid through scholarships or grants to 99 percent of its students. The College is rapidly approaching its sesquicentennial, which it will celebrate in 2028.  The institution frames its identity around the claim of being Montana’s oldest college — a claim rooted in the 1878 founding of the Montana Collegiate Institute in Deer Lodge, though the institutional genealogy connecting that school to the present campus involves more than a century of merger, closure, and reconstitution.

The Heritage Archives were established by interested alumni, staff, faculty, and students of Rocky Mountain College to acquire, preserve, and illustrate the history and development of Rocky Mountain College, Billings Polytechnic Institute, Intermountain Union College, Montana Wesleyan College, the College of Montana, and Montana Collegiate Institute. The Archives Collection is comprised of materials whose primary purpose is for research by alumni, students, and the public.  The Paul M. Adams Memorial Library, which houses these archives, was named for a professor who served the predecessor Intermountain Union College from 1905 to 1935. The library building itself was completed in 1959 and expanded in 1998 following a successful fundraising campaign.

The college’s recent capital investments have continued the pattern of campus development. The Dr. Charles Morledge Science Building, completed in 2018, provides modern research laboratory space and represents a significant expansion of the science curriculum beyond its earlier foundations. The college also offers an accredited Occupational Therapy Doctorate program and a Master of Accountancy, extending its graduate offerings in directions consistent with regional workforce needs.

In 2026, the institution remains the only private, four-year liberal arts college in eastern Montana, occupying a distinct institutional niche in a higher education landscape otherwise dominated by Montana’s public university system. Its sandstone buildings, still standing after more than a century, carry the marks of the students who quarried and placed them — a material record of an educational philosophy that treated physical labor and intellectual formation as complementary rather than competing endeavors. The college’s survival through the closure of its predecessors, a catastrophic earthquake, the Depression, two world wars, and the persistent pressures facing small private colleges in rural states, speaks to the accumulated institutional decisions that kept it solvent and relevant across a period of enormous change.

Works Cited

“About RMC.” Rocky Mountain College, rocky.edu/about/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

Billings Gazette. “Retrospective: Rocky Mountain College.” Billings Gazette, 11 May 2021, billingsgazette.com/news/local/history/retrospective-rocky-mountain-college/collection_f6bdd756-4589-5f08-ba31-7c881b748643.html. Accessed 3 May 2026.

Billings Gazette. “Retrospective: ‘Lost’ Colleges of Montana.” Billings Gazette, 5 Dec. 2019, billingsgazette.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/retrospective-lost-colleges-of-montana/collection_fcacfc53-8ca8-5ec8-8207-6f8084779c08.html. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“History and Traditions.” Rocky Mountain College, rocky.edu/about/history-traditions/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“History of Higher Education in Montana.” Montana Historical Society, mths.mt.gov/Research/Compass/Facts. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Lost Colleges: Billings Polytechnic Institute.” LostColleges.com, www.lostcolleges.com/billings-polytechnic-institute. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Master of Physician Assistant Studies.” Rocky Mountain College, rocky.edu/academics/academic-programs/pa/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

Montana History Portal. “Paul M. Adams Memorial Library Rocky Mountain College.” Montana Memory Project, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/2225. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Program History: Aviation.” Rocky Mountain College, rocky.edu/academics/academic-programs/aviation/program-history/. Accessed 3 May 2026.

Rocky Mountain College. Catalog 2025–2026. Rocky Mountain College, July 2025, rocky.edu/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/25-26CourseCatalogWeb.pdf. Accessed 3 May 2026.

“Trask Hall.” Historic Montana: Montana’s Historic Landscape, historicmt.org/items/show/1723. Accessed 3 May 2026.