Demersville holds a distinction that no other ghost town in Montana can claim: it was not abandoned so much as physically relocated. When the Great Northern Railway chose a townsite two miles to the north in 1891, the residents of Demersville did not simply leave. They picked up their buildings, their businesses, and their newspaper and carried them to the new location, which became Kalispell. What remained at the old site was a cemetery and a memory, the ghost of a town that had been the first incorporated community in northwest Montana and had briefly been called the new Chicago of the Flathead Valley.

The man who built Demersville was Telesphore Jacques DeMers, known to everyone as Jack. He was born in 1834 in La Prairie Parish near Montreal, the son of a farming family, and he carried from his Quebec childhood the Catholic faith and the commercial instincts that would define his career. He arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush years, found the California diggings already crowded, and moved north into the Washington Territory, where he established the trading routes and mercantile operations that would make him one of the more successful entrepreneurs in the Pacific Northwest. He married Clara Rivet, a member of the Pend d'Oreille tribe, in 1857, and the two of them built a life and a business together across the mountains of the interior Northwest.

DeMers came to the Flathead country in the 1880s, drawn by reports of fertile land and the commercial opportunities that a new agricultural frontier would create. He established a store at the confluence of the Flathead River and Ashley Creek, on a site that offered access to the steamboat traffic that was beginning to use Flathead Lake as a transportation corridor. The store grew quickly into a trading post, and the trading post grew into a town. By 1887 Demersville had streets, businesses, and the beginnings of the civic institutions that a serious community required.

The town's growth in the late 1880s was spectacular. By 1891 Demersville had more than 1,500 residents, a dozen streets lined with businesses, hotels, dining halls, and 73 licensed saloons and liquor dispensers. The Inter Lake newspaper, founded by Clayton and Emma Ingalls, reported on the town's progress with the boosterish enthusiasm that frontier newspapers brought to their communities, and the July 4, 1890 edition celebrated what it called the grandest Independence Day in the history of the Flathead Valley. The town had a post office, a school, and the full complement of commercial and social institutions that a regional center required.

The rapid growth was not without its difficulties. The relationship between the homesteaders who were flooding into the Flathead Valley and the Native American tribes who had long lived in the region was tense, and in February of 1890 the 25th Regiment of the United States Army, the Buffalo Soldiers, traveled from Fort Missoula with 47 black infantrymen who were stationed in Demersville to maintain order. The regiment's presence was a measure of the anxiety that the town's rapid growth had generated, and the deputized posse that patrolled the community alongside the soldiers was evidence of the frontier justice that characterized the era.

The Great Northern Railway's decision about where to locate its townsite in the Flathead Valley was the most consequential event in Demersville's history. The railroad's surveyors chose a site two miles to the north, on higher ground with better drainage and a more favorable location for the railroad's facilities. The new townsite was platted as Kalispell, and the railroad's arrival in 1891 made it immediately clear that Kalispell would be the dominant community in the valley. The residents of Demersville understood the economics of the situation without being told. The railroad was the artery of commerce, and a town without railroad access was a town without a future.

The response was remarkable. Rather than simply abandoning Demersville, the residents moved it. Buildings were dismantled and reconstructed at the Kalispell site. The Inter Lake newspaper moved its press and its staff. Merchants relocated their inventories and their storefronts. The process was not instantaneous, but it was thorough, and within a few years of the railroad's arrival the site of Demersville was largely empty. Jacob Thomas, executive director of The Museum at Central School in Kalispell, has described the event as unique in his knowledge of frontier history: not a ghost town, but a town that was physically moved to another place.

Jack DeMers himself moved to Kalispell and continued his commercial activities in the new community. The town he had built was gone, but the valley he had helped to develop was thriving, and the institutions he had established in Demersville, including the Inter Lake newspaper, continued to serve the Flathead Valley from their new location. DeMers died in 1900, sixteen years after he had first arrived at the Flathead River confluence and begun building the community that would become Demersville and then, indirectly, Kalispell.

What Remains Today

The most significant surviving remnant of Demersville is its cemetery, located on the southern outskirts of Kalispell. The cemetery spreads across a wide meadow scattered with large pines and gravestones of all shapes and sizes, and the names on the stones, McGovern, Richards, Ingalls, Coram, Rollins, are the names of the men and women who built the first incorporated town in northwest Montana. Some graves are unmarked, lost to time or circumstance. The cemetery is the only significant physical remnant of Demersville that remains in its original location.

The site of the town itself has been absorbed into the southern expansion of Kalispell, and the landscape that Jack DeMers chose for his store in the 1880s is now part of the urban fabric of the Flathead Valley's largest city. The Museum at Central School in downtown Kalispell maintains historical materials related to Demersville and can provide context for visitors interested in the town's history.

Visiting

The Demersville Cemetery is located on the southern outskirts of Kalispell, Montana, in Flathead County. Kalispell is accessible via US Highway 2 and US Highway 93 and is the Flathead County seat and the largest city in northwest Montana. The Museum at Central School in downtown Kalispell is the best starting point for visitors interested in the history of Demersville and the early settlement of the Flathead Valley.

Glacier National Park is approximately 35 miles north of Kalispell via US Highway 2, and Flathead Lake, the largest natural freshwater lake west of the Mississippi, is approximately 10 miles south of Kalispell via US Highway 93.