Kemp Hotel, Terry, Montana

This hotel on main street is a wonderful experience. It’s been restored sufficiently for use but hasn’t had the history restored out of it.
The wallpaper in the rooms still features giant roses and unraveling edges that whisper of 1942 or so. The front desk area has huge worn leather chairs that once sunk into are only escaped from with some determination.  The covered front porch has large wooden rocking chairs where we sat on a Wednesday morning in the summer of 2011 listening to a thundering storm that came over the town and lingered before bellowing on its way east or south. It was wonderful.
The wild roses were in bloom along the street where we had parked the night before walking past the eight foot hollyhocks en route to the front door.
Next morning after the storm had left town we walked a couple of blocks to the store that sells the best cinnamon rolls in Montana or North Dakota right out of the oven.
Our home town had a hotel, too, which was actually newer than Terry’s.
I never quite understood why and certainly didn’t dare ask but the big two story Great Northern Hotel was completely off limits for any child of the countryside. It was just across the street one way from the town’s single bar, and across the movie theater the other way. I suppose that was reason enough.
It was a large brick building that was completely finished on all sides and on the top. It was not that bad things were said about it. Nothing was ever said about it. There was always a desk clerk on duty and the front entrance looked nice enough, just like the other businesses in town.
When I visited in the 1970s there was a holiday craft sale of some kind being held in the a large room in the hotel, and a fundraiser for the high school featuring t-shirts and sweat shirts. Finally being of sufficient age to go through the front door without permission I satisfied the now irrelevant curiosity and found dark wood covering almost everything. What was not covered with wood was upholstered in deep brown leather. It had a clean smell of really old.
The tables and chairs brought in for the craft sale looked miniature and irrelevant in the midst of the dusty memories and ghosts of all those in the past who had permission to be in the hotel or went there without permission. The modern ladies of the ’70s who were purchasing crafts looked like actresses who had been directed to the wrong set.
Terry is 160 miles south of where our farm was.

The site where Terry is located was first called Joubert’s Landing, in recognition of the man who built a supply point along the Yellowstone River for freighters traveling from Bismarck, Dakota Territory, to Miles City, Montana Territory. When the Northern Pacific Railway‘s transcontinental rail line arrived in 1881, the town was renamed for Alfred Howe Terry,^[6] a General in the Union Army who commanded an 1876 expedition in connection with George Armstrong Custer’s campaign against Native Americans,^[7]specifically in the west. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry,_Montana

Terry had drinkable ground water (which we didn’t have) and some big trees near the Yellowstone river (which we didn’t have – the trees, that is) that made log houses possible.
The planting of Terry’s first tree was documented for the history books.

The town was located just south of the Yellowstone River midway between the larger towns of Miles City and Glendive…Seen from a distance in 1893, it looked like a mirage on the dusty treeless plain. Sagebrush and cactus were its only vegetation. The first tree in Terry—a wild plum—would be planted later that year.
What was not apparent to the eye was the resource that gave Terry its life: its ample underground water supply. In an area where water was scarce and almost undrinkable (like 160 miles further north!) due to alkali salts, this was no small matter. (from Photographing Montana, Donna M. Lucey)

And consider these descriptions of developments further south in Hamilton County, Nebraska, where the commercial wagon trails were operating as early as 1847.

A well-traveled freighting road was established between the Missouri River…along the south bank of the Platte River, to Fort Kearney…a heavy freighting business was done over this road from about 1852 to 1860. It was called the Ox-Bow Trail…The great freighting firm of Russell, Majors and Waddell used this road in 1858 and 1859 for the transportation of thousands of wagon loads of freight to Utah. (The Way was Long, Denny Enderle & Diann Jensen, 1999)

They had commercial wagon activity in Nebraska but there weren’t many trees around there either so when they didn’t have time or inclination to wait for lumber to arrive on the wagons, they built buildings out of straw bales.

Advantages of straw-bale construction over conventional building systems include the renewable nature of straw, cost, easy availability, naturally fire-retardant and high insulation value. Disadvantages include susceptibility to rot, difficulty of obtaining insurance coverage, and high space requirements for the straw itself. 

<—- Pilgrim Holiness Church in Arthur, Nebraska

Straw-bale construction was greatly facilitated by the mechanical hay baler, which was invented in the 1850s and was widespread by the 1890s.  It proved particularly useful in the Nebraska Sandhills. Pioneers seeking land under the 1862 Homestead Act and the 1904 Kinkaid Act found a dearth of trees over much of Nebraska. In many parts of the state, the soil was suitable for dugouts and sod houses. However, in the Sandhills, the soil generally made poor construction sod;  in the few places where suitable sod could be found, it was more valuable for agriculture than as a building material. 
The third documented use of hay bales in construction in Nebraska was a schoolhouse built in 1901 or 1902. Unfenced and unprotected by stucco or plaster, it was reported in 1902 as having been eaten by cows. To combat this, builders began plastering their bale structures; if cement or lime stucco was unavailable, locally obtained “gumbo mud” was employed.  Between 1896 and 1945, an estimated 70 straw-bale buildings, including houses, farm buildings, churches, schools, offices, and grocery stores had been built in the Sandhills. In 1999, 2173 surviving bale buildings were reported in Arthur and Logan Counties, including the 1928 Pilgrim Holiness Church in the village of Arthur, which is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw-bale_construction
Once I started thinking about the problem of getting decent lumber in the early 1900s I wanted to understand whether the problem presented itself differently in other pioneer communities. I found that the solutions were different but the problem usually was not.
I thought it was worth talking about what was required of those who chose to fight their way into a future on the prairie—a prairie that didn’t offer materials for building buildings—a prairie that stretched from the Canadian latitudes to the Texas-Mexico border.
The prairie included parts of Colorado, Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan. It was big. It was very big.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Plains
Considering the times, it was actually pretty upscale to build even the outbuildings out of lumber!
The wash house on our farm was well designed for a variety of purposes that morphed over the years. It was constructed with good quality milled lumber from far away which had arrived at the nearest rail head (nine miles) and was hauled to the farm in a horse wagon.
These outbuildings were built to last and they did. The wash house was well-shingled and sat between the cave (underground vegetable storage—a root cellar with doorway of standard size and cement steps eight feet into the earth) and the outhouse. The wash house had two windows, a big wooden door with a huge hook that closed it tightly from the outside, a wooden floor, a well-shingled roof and exterior walls which were also covered with thick shingles, keeping the wood dry and saving the paint for more important buildings both little (outhouses) and big (barns and houses).
The original use of the wash house was, obviously, a place to wash clothes. Pre-electricity (1949 or so, generally speaking, in our rural area) the gas-engine washing machine stood in the wash house. After electricity, the wash house became a place for storing things, playing house, and watching dynamite thunderstorms as we sat in safety with the door open, enjoying the sound and the fury presented for our instruction.
Playing house in the wash house was a perfect illustration of practicing being grownup, and might include staying there overnight in the summer time all of twenty feet from the back door of the house, especially if my cousin could come over to stay.
An old double bed was stored there so we would drag blankets and pillows out and create our temporary home. Once things were dark and quiet in the house (although Mom would always leave the light on at the back steps in case we changed our minds about our level of courage in the middle of the night and wanted the option of coming inside to go to my bedroom) we would scare ourselves in the silence as we listened for the sounds of things that were actually never out there. Badgers and coyotes were part of the night in our pastures so once darkness descended, we didn’t go out of the wash house for anything except an unavoidable quick trip to the outhouse which was right next door, ten feet down the wooden sidewalk and fifteen feet to the left – the latter jog providing concealment of the outhouse from the house.
Such animals usually steered clear of farmsteads day or night, the exception being a sick or wounded animal in which case there was even more reason to not want any encounter. Skunks might wander through occasionally, but the bare prairie hills weren’t as accommodating for their homesteading needs as the badgers: skunks preferred a little more foliage than our hills provided.
Practicing being a grownup was pretty much what childhood was about. It would have been considered strange for childhood to be thought of as a destination, or even as a place to linger; but it was a perfectly respectable way station en route to actually being grown up and our play reflected that, including the overnight stays in the wash house.
Finished lumber was highly valued and difficult to obtain in the early years and was always re-used. Repurposing and recycling are considered innovative (today) only by those who don’t know nothin’. When some building had outlived its original purpose and either fell down or was taken down, the old square nails were pulled out and the lumber carefully stacked, anticipating the day when the farmer would go to the lumber pile to locate the perfect piece for some new project he was working on or some pig fence he was repairing.
Bits of lumber were specifically not used for bonfires or weinie roasts, both of which we enjoyed whenever we had the chance. The wood for such entertainment came from dead branches that were broken off the standing trees in the coulees – it was burned with a contentend conscience since it hadn’t been laboriously obtained.
Neither the size or quality of those trees was suitable for log buildings or for milling but the dead branches were perfect for roasting hot dogs (stuck on to the end of a skinny, sharp branch selected for the purpose) and marshmallows on a summer evening or winter afternoon.