Missoula disappears from view after you duck under Interstate 90 on the city's Northside and make the short drive into the hills and to the homestead. Once there, you can almost feel the calluses and see the sweat from a life lived off the land that sustained a family from nearly one turn of a century to the next.
It's worth the short trip just to spend a pleasant spring afternoon out of sight of the congestion and traffic in full swing just over the hill.
At 2 p.m., you can tour the grounds, and learn what life was like here.
William and Emma Randolph, who purchased their original 80 acres in 1907 from the Moon family, which had homesteaded the land in 1889, did a little bit of everything here.
They raised chickens and cows, sold eggs and cream and occasionally butchered a cow and sold the meat. They grew fruit in their orchard and vegetables in their garden and went door-to-door in town with their produce.
They even had a coal mine, using the coal to heat their home and bartering the rest for shoes, gas and medical services.
The Randolph home, barn and many outbuildings are made mostly from scrap lumber. The Randolphs hauled old railroad boxcar doors up the hill on wagons every time there was a new building to be constructed.
It makes restoration a challenge.
“Nothing is level, nothing's plumb,” says Mike Kurz of Syzygy Construction, which restored the building - originally thought to be a chicken coop - that Bill Randolph lived in, and where caretakers DeSilvey and Johnston now live.
“We tried to incorporate modern technology and materials so that what we do lasts,” Kurz continues. “But the overlying goal has been to keep the integrity of the space and the feel of the buildings.”
When the Moon cabin - the original claim shack from 1889 - was restored, workers removed the roof, which was partially caved in, then laid the four walls down in the grass. They built a new structure, then raised the original walls back up and attached them.
“When we started up here, we did a triage, and the original claim shack was most in danger of being lost,” DeSilvey says.
The latest project, which allowed DeSilvey and Johnston, her husband, to move onto the property to care for it - and also provides a new handicapped-accessible public bathroom - came about through lots of donations, volunteers and grants.
Kurz's business donated significant labor and materials. Eyer Electrical Construction provided all of the labor for the electrical work. Deneve and Kahl Concrete donated the ramp to the public bathroom. The paint came from Garden City Paint and Glass. Home Resource donated recycled materials, BFI/Allied Waste Systems provided dumping, and continues to haul water for the cisterns, and Jeff Rolston-Clemmer donated architectural work.
The largest amount of money, $10,000, came from a “Preserving Missoula County's History” grant, but there were also smaller amounts from the Cinnabar Foundation, the Steele-Reese Foundation and the Montana Cultural Trust. The Missoula Conservation District provided a grant to help with the pump and cistern. The Parks and Recreation Department helped with earth-moving, and provided funds for the Americans with Disabilities Act bathroom. The city also gave a Small Project grant.
On a warm Tuesday afternoon, the farm is alive with teenagers, all a part of Youth Homes' Inner Roads Wilderness Therapy Program, who are working the garden and tending to the 25 chickens in the chicken house.
The kids, who just spent a month camping in the wilds of Utah's Escalante National Monument, are now camping and working at the homestead, reassimilating themselves back into the society that got them in trouble in the first place.
Here they keep busy, interact with their families who visit them, and let the lessons learned after a month in the wilderness sink in before returning to their lives.
It's just one of the ways the Moon-Randolph Homestead now serves its community. A conservation easement limits the amount of camping allowed on the property to three weeks a year, which makes the decaying hay and milk barn an enticing possibility for the next big rehabilitation project.
“That's the dream,” says DeSilvey, who works for the North Missoula Community Development Corp., which has managed the city-owned homestead since 2000.
DeSilvey and Johnston envision a restored barn that serves both livestock and people. The barn is big enough that it could house not only livestock, but both a community meeting space, and a bunkhouse that would let the Inner Roads Wilderness Therapy Program spend more time on the farm.
One of the boys in the program is attaching twigs and sticks to a board, building a ladder the chickens can use to climb up to their nests.
Emma Randolph kept 300 white leghorn chickens here by 1915, and a University of Montana intern was determined to reintroduce the breed to the homestead. So half the new flock are white leghorns, and half are Rhode Island reds.
The young chickens just moved out of the caretakers' house, where they spent the first 3 1/2 weeks of their lives.
“When they turned into teenager chickens they really needed to move,” DeSilvey says.
In the milk house sits an old wooden box containing a couple of worn books and the remains of several others.
Mice shredded most of the books over the years. Like many of the artifacts on the homestead, little is of museum quality.
But it is oh-so interesting.
Newspapers dating back to 1892 were used as insulation in the original claim shack, and you can read them on an inner wall. DeSilvey points to her favorite headline, out of the March 2, 1909, Spokesman-Review.
“Women's Brains Better Than Men's” it reads.
Inside the claim shack the caretakers have stored boxes and boxes filled with things they've found on the property. There are National Geographics dating back to the 1920s, mounds of paperwork - William Randolph kept meticulous financial records on the farm - and dozens of oddities, such as the 1892 “coins” that promoted Bozeman as the site of Montana's Capitol building.
Inside the National Geographics you'll find everything from pressed flowers to grocery lists and, since they aren't in mint condition, DeSilvey allows students who take field trips to the homestead to page through them.
There's even William Randolph's formula for figuring out how many tons of hay are in a haystack:
“Multiply the length by the width, then divide the over by 3,” it reads, “and multiply the former by 1/3 and divide by 512. The result will be the tons of hay in stack.”
It mentions allowing for rotten spots. On this piece of cardboard, Randolph estimates the stack he measured had 2 4/5ths tons of hay which, at $10 a ton, was worth $28 whenever it was he did his figuring. Guessing there is $3.50 in damaged hay, he writes that he estimates the stack to be worth $24.50.
DeSilvey, whose book “Butterflies and Railroad Ties: A History of a Montana Homestead” takes readers through a history of the place, says the Randolphs often put the money made on the farm back into it, buying more land every 10 years or so.
“They did fine in the Great Depression,” she says. “They were so good at using what they had, they even acquired more land during that period.”
That land now belongs to all Missoulians. The open space is yours to enjoy any time, and the homestead is open Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. from May to October.
Reporter Vince Devlin can be reached at 523-5260 or at vdevlin@missoulian.com
Pack a lunch
The Apple Blossom Picnic is Saturday afternoon at the Moon-Randolph Homestead located behind Waterworks Hill. The homestead is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., and people are invited to visit and bring a picnic lunch if they'd like. You can walk in from Duncan Drive in the Rattlesnake Valley on the North Hills trail system (about a 1 1/2-mile hike), or meet at the Zip Beverage parking lot at the north end of Scott Street, just over the Scott Street Bridge, at noon to carpool up the hill (parking is limited at the homestead). A public tour begins at 2 p.m.
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