Liberty County was carved from the northern Montana plains in 1920, at the height of the homestead boom that was transforming the Hi-Line country. The county's creation was itself a product of the homestead era, as the growing population of settlers along the Great Northern Railway line demanded the local government services that a county seat could provide. Chester, the county seat, grew up as a railroad and agricultural service community, and the smaller communities that appeared along the Great Northern line in Liberty County were the satellites that served the surrounding homestead population. Lothair was one of these satellites, a community that began when a homesteader named Peter Greiner started to build along the railroad in 1910 and grew into a small but functioning settlement before the homestead bust reduced it to a ghost town.

The Great Northern Railway's role in creating Lothair was as fundamental as it was in creating every other Hi-Line community. The railroad established a station at the Lothair location, and the station gave the community its commercial reason for existing. Grain could be loaded at the Lothair elevator and shipped east to the mills, and supplies could be unloaded from the westbound trains and distributed to the surrounding farms. The station was the economic engine of the community, and the businesses and institutions that grew up around it were dependent on its continued operation for their own survival.

Peter Greiner's decision to begin building at Lothair in 1910 was a calculated bet on the future of the Hi-Line country. Greiner was one of the many settlers who came to Liberty County in the years following the passage of the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, which offered 320-acre claims to anyone willing to farm the land for five years. The promotional literature that the Great Northern Railway distributed described the Hi-Line country as a land of opportunity for the wheat farmer, and the settlers who responded to this promotion arrived with the expectation that the deep soils and the reliable summer rains would support the kind of grain farming that had made the Midwest prosperous.

The community that grew up around Greiner's initial construction had the character of the other Hi-Line settlements of the homestead era. A post office was established, a school was built, and the commercial establishments that a small agricultural community required appeared along the main street. The women and men who built Lothair were building for permanence, and the institutions they created reflected their expectation that the community would grow and persist.

The years of peak activity for Lothair coincided with the peak years of the homestead boom, roughly 1910 to 1918. The First World War created strong demand for wheat, and the prices that Hi-Line farmers received for their grain in the war years were the highest they would ever see. The communities along the Great Northern line prospered during these years, and the optimism that had brought the settlers to the Hi-Line seemed to be justified by the evidence of the fields and the grain elevators.

The collapse came quickly. The combination of drought and falling wheat prices in the early 1920s drove thousands of Hi-Line homesteaders off the land, and the communities that had served them shrank as the farms around them were abandoned. Lothair lost population and function as the homestead economy collapsed, and the community that Peter Greiner had begun building in 1910 was reduced to a shadow of its former self within a decade of the boom's end. The drought and depression of the 1930s completed the process, and Lothair joined the long list of Hi-Line communities that exist today only as scattered foundations and fading memories.

The history of Lothair is inseparable from the history of the Hi-Line homestead boom, a story that is one of the more poignant in Montana's agricultural past. The settlers who came to Liberty County in the years after 1909 were not fools or dreamers; they were responding to real economic incentives and to the promotional claims of the Great Northern Railway and the federal government. That the Hi-Line's agricultural potential had been systematically overstated was not apparent until the drought years revealed the fragility of the farming economy that the homesteaders had built on the northern plains.

The Liberty County landscape that the homesteaders settled was one of the more challenging environments on the Hi-Line, a country of short summers, cold winters, and rainfall that was barely sufficient for wheat farming in the best years and entirely insufficient in the drought years. The settlers who came to Liberty County in the years after 1909 were farming at the margin of what the northern Montana climate could support, and the communities they built were correspondingly fragile. Lothair was no exception; the community that Peter Greiner began building in 1910 was dependent on the continued productivity of the surrounding farms, and when the farms failed, the community failed with them. The men and women who built Lothair were not naive about the challenges of the Hi-Line country; they were optimistic, which is a different thing, and their optimism was not unreasonable given the information they had when they made their decisions.

What Remains Today

The site of Lothair is in Liberty County, along the Great Northern Railway corridor in the Hi-Line country. The physical evidence of the community may include the foundations of buildings, the remnants of the grain elevator, and the disturbed terrain of the townsite. The Liberty County seat of Chester is the nearest city with visitor services.

The Hi-Line country of Liberty County retains much of the open, windswept character that the homesteaders encountered when they arrived in the early twentieth century, and the scattered remnants of the homestead communities provide a tangible connection to the history of the settlement era.

Visiting

Lothair is located in Liberty County, along US Highway 2 in the Hi-Line country of northern Montana. Chester, the Liberty County seat, is the nearest city with visitor services, located on US Highway 2. The Liberty County Museum in Chester maintains records related to the history of the county's homestead communities.

Havre, the Hill County seat and the largest city on the Hi-Line, is approximately 50 miles east of Chester on US Highway 2 and provides a full range of visitor services for those exploring the Hi-Line country.