Havre, Montana:

From Bullhook Bottoms to Empire Builder

Havre sits where the plains meet the Bear Paw foothills and the iron ribbon of the Great Northern Railway cuts east–west across northern Montana. To walk its downtown today is to walk through the chapters of American westward expansion: a depot that smells faintly of oil and old timetables, a grid of streets named for the railroad they face, and parcels of brick and wood that remember a hurrying century. The town’s origin — and its soul — were laid down in steel and smoke; Havre was born because trains needed a place to stop, repair, fuel and be re-routed. 

If you want a single hinge on which Havre’s history turns, it is the Great Northern Railway. James J. Hill’s enterprise pushed across the northern tier in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and where his rails needed a division point — a place to service locomotives, to change crews and to marshal freight — towns sprang up almost overnight. Havre (said to be named after Le Havre, France) was one of those towns. Businesses, boarding houses, saloons, shoe shops and blacksmiths clustered near the tracks; men who worked on the railroad lodged nearby, and merchants who supplied the trains and the homesteaders took rooms on First Street. The railroad didn’t just bring commerce — it created a new kind of community. 

The choice of Bull Hook Siding (the pre-town name) as a division point in 1891 marked Havre’s rise. A division point meant roundhouses, shops, water tanks and the mechanics who kept iron beasts running. From those facilities radiated jobs, capital and a constant stream of people who arrived with little more than a bag and a dream. Ranchers and homesteaders came to town to trade, and Fort Assinniboine — established a few miles southwest in the 1870s and 1880s — supplied soldiers and a market for horses and beef. For decades the fort, the ranches and the railroad formed an economic three-legged stool that propped up a town in the middle of the Hi-Line. 

The human texture of Havre in the first decades of the twentieth century was rough and full of variety. Alongside merchants and railroad men were the Chinese laundrymen who washed, repaired and pressed the clothes of the region; there were blacksmiths who could shoe a horse in the dimmest of light, and saloonkeepers who kept the town’s gossip and its whiskey in equal measure. Names you find in old ledgers—Descelles and Pepin among them—were more than names: they were men whose land deals, cattle herds and small industries made Havre a place where people stayed rather than passed through. Those everyday biographies explain why Havre settled into permanence; it wasn’t only the rails but the people who decided to root themselves there. 

Then came fire — the elemental test that so often reorders frontier towns. In 1904 a blaze swept through the wooden business district, leaving ash and questions. The merchants faced a choice: leave or carry on. They chose the latter, and chose ingenuity. Instead of abandoning their goods and customers they moved — temporarily, they said — into the cellars and shallow tunnels beneath the sidewalks and storefronts. The result is a curious and rather American solution: “Havre Beneath the Streets,” where, for a time, business continued beneath the feet of passersby while brick buildings rose anew above. The subterranean rooms sheltered everything from meat markets to saloons; they governed the rhythm of trade while the town’s main street was rebuilt in fireproof brick. That underground economy — both practical and a little illicit, given the brothels and opium dens later associated with it — became part of Havre’s legend. Today those basements are a museum and a tour: a living memory of how a community refused to let catastrophe erase it. 

The year 1904 also left a different physical legacy: the depot. Built by the Great Northern in the years when passenger travel and freight movement were at their zenith, the depot functioned as Havre’s doorway to the continent. It was a place of arrivals and farewells, of trunks and telegrams, of hasty embraces as men boarded the Empire Builder or the long freights that threaded the transcontinental line. Today a statue of James J. Hill and a preserved steam locomotive stand near Havre’s Amtrak stop — a reminder that the town’s origins and identity are intertwined with the history of American railroading. The depot’s presence is not merely commemorative; it is the continuing pulse of a place that was, and in many ways still is, a railroad town. 

Havre’s growth made possible institutions that anchored civic life. In the early decades of the twentieth century the town became Hill County’s seat, and neighborhoods of modest bungalows and stately turn-of-the-century homes arose to house the town’s middle class and business leaders. In time much of that residential fabric was recognized for its architectural and social significance: the Havre Residential Historic District captures the span from Queen Anne houses to Craftsman bungalows, reflecting the economic cycles of boom and retrenchment that accompanied railroad expansion, wartime demand and later adjustments. These are not idle details: architecture tells you about aspiration, family life, and the rhythms of a place. 

Culture and memory in Havre are kept not only in brick and timber but in museums. The H. Earl Clack Museum and the Hill County collections preserve fossils, Native American artifacts, and the homesteader and railroader material culture that tells the town’s long story. Nearby archaeological sites, like the Wahkpa Chu’gn buffalo jump, link the town backward to a far longer human history on the plains — a reminder that Havre sits on land people have used and understood for centuries. These museums and sites perform for a local audience a service Ambrose championed: they translate ordinary objects into stories that let each generation understand how the previous ones lived, worked and imagined the future. 

Havre’s twentieth century was a story of steady adaptation. The Burlington Northern—and later BNSF—remained a major local employer, but like many rail towns, Havre weathered workforce reductions as technology and consolidation changed the railroad industry. Health care, education (notably Montana State University-Northern), and government services grew in importance, creating a diversified economic base for the city that kept it a regional hub. Through it all the town kept something of its original character: an orientation to the wide horizon, a habit of neighborly help when storms — literal or economic — came through, and a stubborn belief in place. 

To tell Havre’s story is to notice the small things: a depot bench worn by generations of travelers; skylights in the sidewalks that are actually the roots of the underground stores; the way Main Street slopes and the light falls off the brick in late afternoon. It is also to pay attention to the larger currents — the building of railroads, the presence of the fort, the settlement of homesteaders, and the reckoning with fire and economic change. Oral history collected from Havre’s families—testimonies of railroaders and shopkeepers—turns the abstract sweep of dates and acts into a human chronicle: of people who gambled on a siding and stayed; of wives who ran the boardinghouses when men were gone on long runs; of entrepreneurs who converted the ashes of a wooden main street into brick and a new beginning. 

What of Havre now? It is a small city—roughly nine thousand people by the 2020 census—but a city that keeps its past in view even as it looks forward. Its “Hi-Line” identity binds it to other prairie towns whose fortunes were made by the rails; its museums and historic districts preserve the places where memory and commerce intersect; and its depot still receives the Empire Builder, bringing passengers across the Northern Rockies as it has done for more than a century. For visitors and residents alike, Havre exemplifies a certain strand of American history: the story of places that were made by technology and hardened by necessity, that took catastrophe and turned it into community, and that hold fast to a sense of continuity even as the country around them transforms. 

Selected sources and further reading:

Great Northern Railway history (GNRHS); Havre Beneath the Streets tour; Havre, Montana (Wikipedia); Havre Historic Downtown and Railroad District (Central Montana); Havre station (Great American Stations); Fort Assinniboine history; H. Earl Clack Museum.