Public History - Public Health

State Historic Preservation Office

Scourges including smallpox, typhoid fever, and contaminated drinking water ravaged the West’s inhabitants. Disease impacted many of Montana’s settlements, and left particularly devastating and lasting impacts on tribal nations. Like COVID-19 today, diseases throughout Montana’s history disproportionately impacted native people. Despite the need, Congress did not codify provisions for health care to all federally recognized nations until the Snyder Act of 1921.¹ No statewide public health entity existed in Montana until 1901, when the Legislature established the Montana State Board of Health.

Between 1864 and 1901, Montana laws vested the responsibility for public health to local jurisdictions, but retained a few basic health-related laws. The 1866 Montana Territorial Legislature exempted “all squares and lots dedicated or kept open for health” from taxation. A year later, the Civil Practice Act deemed “anything which is injurious to health…the subject of an action.” Child’s Health Primer sat on every school’s bookshelf, and the state seated a Board of Examiners to regulate and certify medical practitioners by 1889. Municipalities could appoint local health boards and establish quarantines, and by 1895, Montana Codes provided that the state could detain people on the grounds of public health. Montana’s 1895 laws also codified the establishment and duties of County Boards of Health to guard against contagious or infectious diseases.²

Montana’s Seventh Legislative Assembly created the State Board of Health of Montana (BOH) in 1901. The Board had “the general care of the sanitary interests of the people” and authorized “sanitary investigations and inquiries respecting the causes of disease, and especially epidemics, the causes of mortality and the influence of locality, employment, habits, and other circumstances and conditions, upon the health of the people.”³ Concerns included Rocky Mountain spotted fever; tuberculosis; food and drug safety; storm sewers; infant, maternal and child health; a lack of local health officials; and sanitation in schools, at tourist facilities, and on passenger trains. Over the next few decades, the BOH expanded to multiple divisions and oversaw advancements in many areas including research, epidemiology, sanitation, licensing, and public health education.⁴

Residents of Darby line up at a schoolhouse to get free vaccinations against Rocky Mountain spotted fever in the 1930s. Rocky Mountain Laboratories Historical Collection

Rocky Mountain spotted fever particularly concerned officials and residents during the first decades of the twentieth century, and research into the disease concentrated in the Bitterroot Valley. The BOH sanctioned research there beginning in 1901, and work progressed with fits and starts through the 1910s. Efforts included tick collection, eradication, and vaccination. The researchers worked from tents, rented houses, and other makeshift labs until 1928, when the BOH used state funds to construct the Montana Board of Entomology Laboratory in Hamilton. The federal Public Health Service purchased the laboratory in 1932, renaming it Rocky Mountain Labs (RML). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) took control in 1937. RML staff worked to help prevent and treat military personnel from spotted fever, typhus, and yellow fever during World War II. RML continues to function as one of the nation’s most important research and vaccine production facilities.⁵

Tribal members present public health nurse Henrietta Crockett with a star quilt in recognition of her work to battle tuberculosis in Native American communities, 1949. Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, MC433-359-2.

After World War II, public health research expanded at the state’s universities as well. During the late 1950s, scientists at Montana State College (later Montana State University–Bozeman) agitated for a new laboratory to support medical research. Funded in part with state money and a grant from the NIH, the Medical Science Wing, later named Cooley Laboratory, opened in 1960. The biomedical research programs at MSU continue to expand including Microbiology and Immunology, Cell Biology and Neuroscience, and pre-Medical studies. At the University of Montana–Missoula, the School of Pharmacy began in 1907, and a broader Science program initiated during the 1930s. UM’s College of Health added programs through the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation, Center for Environmental Health Services, the Center for Structural & Functional Neuroscience, Social Work, Family Medicine Residency, and Neural Injury Center.⁶

Dr. William H. Sippel administers the polio vaccine to children at Emerson School, Bozeman, 1954. MT Dept Health and Environmental Sciences Photograph Collection (Lot 030). MHS.

The BOH oversaw the state Department of Health established in 1967, and both entities added Environmental Services to their name in 1971. The Board existed until 1994. A year later, the Department of Health restructured together with the state Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services to become Montana’s Department of Public Health and Human Services (DPHHS). The Department operates from historic buildings on the Capitol Campus in Helena, including the DPHHS (formerly SRS) building, and the Cogswell Building.

Historic places throughout Montana continue to serve important roles in public health. During the COVID-19 pandemic, county health offices, together with state and federal entities worked together gathering data, conducting research, providing educational materials, and distributing vaccines. Statewide, herculean efforts to combat disease and promote public health persist, and challenges continue to arise.

ENDNOTES

1. BL Shelton, “The Legal and Historical Roots of Health Care for American Indians and Alaska Natives in the United States,” Issue Brief. (Menlo Park, CA: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, 2004), p. 7; 42 Stat. 208; Jeffrey Ostler, “Disease Has Never Been Just Disease for Native Americans,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2020; Donald Warne and Linda Bane Frizzell, “American Indian Health Policy: Historical Trends and Contemporary Issues,” American Journal of Public Health, 2014 June; 104 (Suppl 3): S263–S267. ↩
2. Laws of the Territory of Montana Passed at the Third Session of the Legislature, 1866, Chapter II, Section 4, (Virginia City, MT: Jno. P. Bruce, Public Printer, 1866), p. 10; General Laws and Memorials and Resolutions of the Territory of Montana Passed at the Fourth Session of the Legislative Assembly, 1867, Title VIII, Chapter 1, Section 249, (Helena, MT. : State Pub. Co, 1915), p. 187; “An Act to Regulate the Practice of Medicine in the Territory of Montana,” and “School Text Books,” Laws, Resolutions and Memorials of the Territory of Montana Passed at the Sixteenth Regular Session of the Legislative Assembly, 1889, (Helena, MT: Journal Pub. Co., Public Printers, 1889), pp. 175-178 and 212; DS Wade et al., “Political Code of Montana,” The Codes and Statutes of Montana: In Force July 1st, 1895, Title I, Chapter III, Section 50 (Butte, MT: Inter Mountain Publishing Co., 1895), p. 14. ↩
3. As quoted in Montana State Board of Health, 26th Biennial Report, 1950-1952: Marking 50 years of Service in Guarding, Improving, Montana’s Health, Helena, MT, 1952. ↩
4. Jessie Nunn, “Board of Health Building,” Montana Historic Property Record Form, 2013, on file at MT SHPO, Helena. ↩
5. “History of Rocky Mountain Labs (RML),” National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases website, n.d., accessed May 11, 2021. https://www.niaid.nih.gov/about/rocky-mountain-history. ↩
6. Jessie Nunn, “Medical Science Research Building (Cooley Labs),” “Social and Rehabilitation Services Department Building (DPHHS),” “Board of Health Building,” Montana Historic Property Record Forms, 2013 and 2015, on file at MT SHPO, Helena. ↩

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PUBLIC ARCHITECTURE

The Board of Health Building, completed in 1920, stands as one of the first buildings constructed for an individual state agency on the Capitol campus. Currently occupied by the State Historic Preservation Office and Governor’s Office of Community Service, the three-story building displays a restrained revivalist style. The public health department moved nearby to the newly-constructed State Laboratory (Cogswell Building) in 1955. (Photo / Learn more: https://historicmt.org/items/show/2714)

The Board of Entomology Laboratory in Hamilton, Montana was completed in 1928. The federal Public Health Service purchased the laboratory in 1932, renaming it Rocky Mountain Labs (RML). The National Institutes of Health (NIH) took control in 1937. This Collegiate Gothic style structure is now known as “Building 1” in the expansive Rocky Mountain Laboratories (RML) campus. (Photo: Rocky Mountain Laboratories Historical Collection / Learn more: https://historicmt.org/items/show/1754)

The State Tuberculosis (TB) Hospital at Galen opened in 1913. As the incidence of TB decreased by the late 20th century, the facility focused on lung disease, and later functioned as an alcohol treatment center and hospital for the MT Dept. of Institutions. The hospital closed in 1993. Montana’s Forensic Mental Health Center opened on the campus in 2016. The “Original Sanitarium Building” features a large cottage-style treatment, with wide, deep porches and lots of natural light to help the patients’ convalescence. (Photo: John Westenberg, NR files, MT SHPO, September 1980.)

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2021 MONTANA PRESERVATION POSTER

Montana SHPO's final Montana Preservation Poster celebrates the state’s public health history, featuring Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton. Montana has been a leader in public health since the turn of the 20th century, when entomological research became concentrated in the Bitterroot Valley. In 1928, the state constructed “Building 1” at what would eventually become Rocky Mountain Laboratory (RML). During World War II, the laboratory produced vaccines to protect soldiers against spotted fever, typhus, and yellow fever. Today, scientists at RML investigate a wide variety of infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

To order your free Montana Preservation Poster, send an email with your mailing address and poster selection to Melissa.Munson@mt.gov, or call (406) 444-7715.

https://mhs.mt.gov/Shpo/NationalReg/PreservationPoster

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Embodied Energy of Locally Sourced Brick Buildings

By Pete Brown, Montana State Historic Preservation Officer

Brick construction is valued for its resilience, and historically, its presence indicated a sense of permanence and confidence in a community’s future. Consequently, nearly every sizeable city in Montana had nearby clay pits and brickworks to meet local demands.

Location of Blossburg clay pits in relation to Western Clay Manufacturing and the Placer Hotel in downtown Helena. (Google Maps)

In Helena, clay traveled fewer than 20 miles by rail from the Blossburg pits to Western Clay Manufacturing (now Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts), which delivered a finished product first by wagon then by trucks to local job sites, such as the Placer Hotel. Today’s brick is made and transported hundreds of miles from out of state.

While all brick buildings embody a significant investment of energy from clay extraction to kiln firing and transport, locally made historic brick represents a smaller carbon footprint than its imported counterpart of today. Demolition of viable historic brick buildings squanders that investment of energy and expands our carbon footprint. Preservation extends the embodied energy’s dividend and enables development within the smaller carbon footprint of a century ago.

“The greenest building is the one already built.” – Carl Elefante, former president of the American Institute of Architects.

#mtshpo #carbonneutrality #climatexculture #climateheritage #mthist #nationalregisternps

Learn more:

• Placer Hotel and Western Clay properties’ listings in the National Register of Historic Places.
• Placer Hotel at https://historicmt.org/items/show/735
• Western Clay Manufacturing / Archie Bray Foundation at https://historicmt.org/items/show/822

The locally sourced bricks used to complete Helena’s Placer Hotel in 1913 were made from clay that traveled fewer than 20 miles by rail from the Blossburg clay pits to the Western Clay Manufacturing Company. Today’s brick is made and transported hundreds of miles from out of state.

(Photo source: https://mtmemory.org/digital/collection/p267301coll3/id/6871/rec/1)

Demolition of viable historic brick buildings squanders the investment of energy and expands our carbon footprint. Preservation extends the embodied energy’s dividend and enables development within the smaller carbon footprint of a century ago.

The Western Clay Foundation was founded by Englishman C.C. Thurston, who established a brickyard in 1883 at the site that would become eventually become The Archie Bray Foundation. Archie Bray was the son of Thurston’s employee Charles Bray, and upon his father’s death in 1931, became company president. A ceramics engineer, Archie was a creative, talented man and a lover of fine art, who envisioned a pottery on the brickyard grounds. The dream came to fruition in 1951. Today the Archie Bray Foundation is an internationally acclaimed ceramic arts center, welcoming artists who come here to work, share ideas, and keep the dream alive.

Whose Tipi?

By Deb Mitchell, Program Specialist

Museums are generally recognized as good places to go to receive reliable answers about history and material culture. Oftentimes, however, we are the ones with questions.

Plains Indian Tipi on the Front Lawn at the Montana Historical Society (2021).

At the beginning of every summer, we set up a Plains Indian tipi on our front lawn to pay homage to Montana’s original inhabitants. This year is no exception. We recently posted photographs on Facebook of our friend Cary Youpee erecting the tipi (with a little help from MHS staff). Subsequent comments on the post questioning the tribal affiliation of the tipi made me curious, so I did some investigating; here’s what I found out.

The record documenting the provenance of this tipi is both sketchy and contradictory. It was donated to MHS in 2006, by Gundrun Erikson from Arendal, Norway. It had been in storage in Havre with Myrtle and Burton Bosch for several years before that. The tipi was originally owned by Rol Careleno of Havre, where it had been in his basement for quite some time and was in need of repair. Rol gave it to Gundrun, who had it repaired, probably in Havre at a shoe repair shop by the owner who did excellent work. We do not know when the tipi was made or how long it was in storage before it was given to Gundrun, or how long Gundren kept it before donating it to MHS.

The tipi came to the MHS education department in a storage container marked as “a 14 foot Crow tipi.” Presumably, the unnamed tipi maker was the one who identified it as being Crow. Consequently, we have always erected it in the Crow style, which is with a four-pole set-up. Most often, Crow tipis are solid white, however, and this one clearly is not. According to Dr. Shane Doyle—a tribal member and expert on Crow history— there are exceptions in instances where individuals have dreams or are gifted a design. Thus, though somewhat unusual, it is not out of the question that this tipi is Crow.

Digging deeper in response to the Facebook comments, I found correspondence that indicates that the tipi is “a Cree lodge … painted on the Rocky Boy reservation.” What? Now we are wondering, is it Crow? Is it Cree? Or is it a Crow-made tipi later painted by a Cree artist? Just what is the rest of the story?

We hope that someone out there has additional information that they are willing to share with us. We always want to be as accurate as we can and if we do find out that it is truly a Cree tipi, we will need to begin setting it up with a three-pole style. If anyone has the answer to this mystery, please contact me at dmitchell@mt.gov.

Montana Hi-Line and the Syverud brothers, Now Digitized in On-going Project

By Micah Chang, PhD. candidate, Montana State University

Many Montanans perceive the Hi-Line as “drive-through country,” destitute of people and places. However, one glance at Henry and Edgar Syverud’s photo collection challenges that modern cultural stereotype. The Syveruds’ photo collection tells the story of hope and hard times on the Montana Hi-Line through a series of four volumes of scrapbooks, encompassing some 1,500 photographic prints, that track the two brothers awash in the tides of local, regional, and national history.

Lot 045 v1p11.Stamp 1 and Lot 045 v1p11.Stamp 2, Portraits of Henry and Edgar Syverud in their mid-30s

Henry and Edgar Syverud were born in Osnabrock, North Dakota, in the mid-1880s to Knute and Anne Syverud. Both brothers’ lives show their strong connection to Norwegian and Scandinavian ancestry through their immediate communities and worldviews evident in their photo collection. The two brothers were nearly inseparable from the start, both attending the University of North Dakota and then proceeding to homestead in northeastern and eastern Montana.

Lot 045 v1p07.19, View of Henry Syverud (left) while at the University of North Dakota

Henry initially homesteaded in the early 20th century in the area between Coalridge and Dagmar, Montana, in what was then Valley County, though soon to become Sheridan County. While Edgar started farther south in Dawson County, opting to move north into Sheridan County with his brother around 1916. From 1916 until their deaths in 1965 and 1966, Henry and Edgar Syverud lived together on Henry’s homestead, farming and participating in all forms of community activities.

Lot 045 v1p17.1, View of Edgar Syverud with his bicycle and a camera in hand

Both Syverud brothers cataloged their life’s journey through photography and scrapbooks. Edgar was the primary photographer for years, seemingly bringing his camera to every social event in the area. Henry made the scrapbooks, selecting photos and writing the captions and narrative history sections. They were heavily involved with their neighbors in what started out as the East Coalridge Community Club but eventually morphed into the local chapter of the Farmers’ Union. They were also a part of the development of a local Lutheran congregation. Lastly, the brother’s interest in and fascination with petroglyph rocks, which they called “The Writing Rocks.” led to the creation of Writing Rock State Park, which still exists today.

Lot 045 v3p47.3-286, View of the Syveruds’ automobile at the Writing Rock State Park in Divide County, North Dakota. Writing Rock No. 1 is in the foreground

The brothers’ social and work lives, and those of their neighbors, is well documented in the photographs taken mostly from about 1910-1960.

The brothers’ story reflects the larger history of the region. By the time both brothers were in their late teenage years, the Montana Hi-Line flooded with hopefuls—often immigrants, single males, and younger people—searching for a future by proving up a quarter-section of unbroken land. After the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909 both brothers ended up in eastern Montana trying their hand at farming. However, after several years of successive drought and financial hardship, the brothers often found themselves deeply engaged in community activities and eclectic hobbies and side jobs. Through their photographs and scrapbooks the Syveruds created a narrative that shows how people persevered through drought, natural disasters, and failure by relying on their families and friends.

[Lot 045 v1p29.2, View of Edgar Syverud with the East Coalridge Community Club at the Haaven Schoolhouse eating pie

Aside from local history, the Syverud’s unintentionally created a photo archive that sheds light on important facets of regional and national history. The scrapbooks’ heavy focus on agriculture reveals the multiplicity of crops that the Syveruds and other homesteaders in northeastern Montana had to grow in order to achieve any semblance of profit. For example, the use of flax—one of the shortest-lived agronomic crops in Montana—dominates many of Edgar’s early photos of planting, harvesting, and threshing.

Lot 045 v1p15.7, View of Henry Syverud standing in a field of flax in full bloom

Also, the Syverud collection elucidates the history of the United States northern border in a time when the drawing of the 49th parallel was a recent event. Henry and Edgar Syverud recorded the history of their lives; however, upon closer inspection, their photo archive tells the story of many immigrants, Montanans, and Americans.

Photos from the first and second scrapbook volumes. and most of the third, are now digitized and available to those interested in the Syveruds’ story, and the history of homesteading in Sheridan County, Montana. Photos can be browsed and searched on the Montana Memory Project, specifically the MHS Photo Archives’ “Photographs from the Montana Historical Society.” Hundreds more Syverud photos will be added over the next couple months thanks to the continuing financial support of the Sheridan County Historical Association and the Montana History Foundation, in partnership with MHS.