Caitlin DeSilvey came to the little homestead to pick apples. She stayed to preserve and tell its stories.
"Open space isn't just hiking with your dog," DeSilvey said one afternoon last week as she unlocked the door of the 100-plus-year-old cabin hidden in a fold in the North Hills. "Open space is also the history of Missoula."
Out of sight of town, the homestead is unchanged from the early days of the last century, when William and Emma Randolph raised three boys in the little patchwork cabin. The boys' butterfly collection is still pinned to scraps of cardboard on the living-room wall. Their boots are on the floor, all in a row. A dust-colored ledger dated 1909 shows $150 in receipts for dairy products.
DeSilvey wants to write a history of the Randolph ranch, purchased by the city of Missoula - with open space bond money - in 1996. "So we can know what happened here. So we will know how to restore it," she said.
The Hill and Homestead Preservation Coalition, which DeSilvey and her neighbors founded, wants to manage the homestead for education, conservation and agriculture. Last week, the Missoula City Council's conservation committee endorsed the idea, and asked Mayor Mike Kadas to draft a cooperative agreement for the group.
Once the paperwork is in hand, DeSilvey said her coalition can apply for grants and raise money to finance needed restoration work. Already, Yellowstone Pipe Line Co. has offered a $5,000 challenge grant, if the coalition can find matching dollars.
Some day, DeSilvey would like to see a productive garden and orchard, an interactive historical museum, restoration projects, a small retreat center, partnerships with schools and artists, and a diversity of community programs.
"I am intrigued," she said, "by the juxtaposition of this wild space and the long history of human presence. It's a place that feels abandoned, yet I can sense the care given it by the family. There are all these little clues."
In the homestead cabin, DeSilvey found a trunk full of encyclopedias published in 1894. (There were 144,826 horses and 949 mules in Montana that year, one volume revealed. And 16 asses.) Under a floorboard, she found an old printer's plate. There was a grinding stone in the chicken coop.
"It's like treasure hunting," she said.
DeSilvey first came to the homestead in 1996 as a volunteer for Garden City Harvest. She and others gleaned two truckloads of apples from the then-untended orchard: Duchess, Yellow Transparent and MacIntosh. She came back the next week, eager to know more about the place and its stories.
In recent years, volunteers from the Hill and Homestead group have started to sift through the belongings - much of it is trash - in the house and outbuildings, and Missoula's master gardeners have started to prune the orchard. North Side residents have rallied around the project, providing most of the volunteers.
The Randolph family, in fact, considered themselves North Side residents. Before Interstate 90 cut off the hills from the neighborhood, there were sledding parties and picnics on the slopes. And each morning, the Randolph boys walked down the hill to school.
Life on the homestead was not as simple as many people assume, DeSilvey said. The family literally scraped a living off the landscape. They had dairy cows, gardens, a little coal mine, the orchard and chickens.
"The value of the homestead is in its original context," said Mary Manning, chair of the North Hills subcommittee of Missoula's Open Space Advisory Committee. "This isn't an old house embedded in a subdivision. This is a home for humans, and also for hawks and owls and rabbits.
"This is a place where you can see the human presence, but also the wild untouched presence too."
Manning's subcommittee has endorsed the Hill and Homestead Coalition's proposed "preservation services cooperative agreement." It's a new approach to open-space management, and it could work, she said.
Coalition and historic preservation leaders, including DeSilvey, Bob Oaks and Allan Mathews, saw - early on - the value of the homestead, which the city originally proposed selling to generate more money for the open-space account, Manning said. "They saw the treasure, and their hard work over the last few years has made their dream a reality."
Over the years, they convinced city officials and open-space advisers not to sell the land, but to keep it as a "living history" museum.
"This homestead is a little gem. It has incredible lessons to teach," said Mathews, Missoula's historic preservation officer. "At the Randolph place, you can see how people got by when they didn't have much. You can tell there was a family living there, and that they were just barely making it."
The city of Missoula owns about 700 acres of open space in the North Hills. The Randolph homestead is the centerpiece - "for sure," Manning said.
Mathews said he is particularly intrigued by the way the land is slowly reclaiming the buildings. "They're wood and metal, and they haven't been painted for 50 or 60 years. It is very artistic."
Because the buildings are so fragile, the acreage immediately surrounding the homestead is closed to the public. The coalition, though, would eventually like to provide trained guides who could lead tours of the property - for school groups during the week, for the public on weekends. They'll begin on Wednesday, May 24, and Saturday, June 3.
Registration is required for the two upcoming tours, and a $3 fee will be charged for adults. Call 721-PARK to reserve a place. Both tours are at 10 a.m., beginning at City Hall.
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268 or at sdevlin@missoulian.com.
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