Saving Montana's History

By editor

Virginia City, Madison County, Montana

Charles Bovey was known as Charlie, which probably suited him fine since his life was anything but formal. He came to Great Falls in 1926, arriving as a rancher and wheat farmer, but quickly developed a peculiar hobby that would consume most of his waking hours and a good deal of his fortune. Charlie collected things that reminded folks of an age slipping away faster than a Montana snowmelt in April. By 1940, his hobby had outgrown the usual dusty cabinet of curiosities; it became a full-blown recreation of "Old Town Montana" inside a Great Falls fairground exhibit hall.

Now, this was no mere display of shiny trinkets and faded photographs. Charlie’s collection was an attempt to hold onto the disappearing frontier life, the kind of life that once burst with gold rush fever, railroads, and the promise of quick riches. But as anyone who knows Montana’s past can tell you, the truth was always a bit more complicated than a gold rush and a handshake.

In 1944, Charlie took a trip to Virginia City, a place that once thrived as a mining boomtown in the 1860s, but by the mid-20th century, it was more ghost town than city. The reason the buildings still stood was not some grand preservation plan but poverty. The town had been left behind financially, and therefore it had been left standing. No new money meant no demolition crews knocking down the old wooden facades to put up strip malls or gas stations. Charlie saw what many others overlooked: a real slice of Montana’s past, frozen in time by neglect.

He spent the rest of his life buying the town piece by piece.

By 1946, Charlie had founded the Historic Landmark Society of Montana, a statewide nonprofit devoted to what he called “saving Montana’s vanishing frontier heritage.” The name might sound highfalutin, but it was really just Charlie’s way of saying he was willing to spend his own money and time to keep the frontier from disappearing altogether. One of the Society’s earliest projects was to reconstruct the Montana Post building in Virginia City, which had burned down in 1936. This was a significant effort because the Montana Post was the first newspaper in the Montana Territory, established in 1864 by James S. Watson. Watson himself remarked in his memoirs that the paper was “the voice of the mining camps and the dreams of many a hopeful prospector.”

Over the next forty years, Charlie, his wife Sue, and their son Ford worked tirelessly to purchase, stabilize, and restore dozens of properties in Virginia City. They outfitted many buildings with period-authentic furnishings--no plastic replicas or generic antiques here. They wanted visitors to walk into a saloon or a boarding house and feel like the 1860s had just paused for a moment. It was no small feat when you consider that many of these buildings had been neglected for decades, some barely standing after exposure to Montana’s fierce weather.

The Boveys didn’t stop at static restorations. They created living attractions to draw people in and keep the town alive. The Virginia City Players, a troupe of actors performing period dramas, began entertaining visitors. The Brewery Follies, a lively show set in a saloon, brought some much-needed levity and a taste of frontier humor. The Fairweather Inn and Wells Fargo Coffee House offered places for travelers to rest and refresh, keeping the town from becoming a museum frozen in amber.

In 1958, Charlie embarked on an even more ambitious project: relocating the buildings of his Great Falls "Old Town" exhibit, along with over a hundred other historic structures, to Nevada City, a nearby site also rich with mining history. To connect the two towns, the Boveys built the Alder Gulch shoreline railroad, a charming narrow-gauge line that carried visitors between Virginia City and Nevada City. This was not just a tourist gimmick. It was an effort to recreate the hustle and bustle that a real mining region once had, complete with the rattle of railcars and the bustle of commerce.

The economic forces that shaped this region were brutal and complex. Virginia City had been born in 1863 with the discovery of gold on Alder Gulch. The town’s population exploded to over 10,000 by 1865, becoming the largest city between St. Paul and San Francisco at the time. But the boom was short-lived. The depletion of easily accessible gold, combined with the arrival of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1883 that bypassed Virginia City, sent the economy into a slow decline. By the 1940s, the town’s population had shrunk to a few hundred.

Charlie Bovey recognized that the same railroad and mining booms that had built Montana’s frontier towns had also ensured their ruin once the gold ran out or the rails moved elsewhere. His work was a response to the way economic fortunes could build and erase a place in the span of a few decades.

Charlie died suddenly of a heart attack on June 9, 1978, in Nevada City, at the age of 78. His last words to his longtime curator John Ellingsen were simple and earnest: “Take care of things.” Sue Bovey passed away in 1988, leaving their son Ford to manage the sprawling collection of properties. Ford found the task overwhelming, as maintaining a historic district is less about glory and more about constant upkeep, fundraising, and bureaucratic wrangling.

Rather than let the properties be sold off piece by piece to the highest bidder or fall back into decay, a determined group of local residents formed the Virginia City Preservation Alliance in 1994. Their efforts culminated in the Montana State Legislature stepping in to purchase the Bovey properties in 1997 for $6.5 million, a sizeable sum recognizing the cultural and historical value of the site. The legislature also established the Montana Heritage Commission to manage the properties, ensuring a public stewardship grounded in long-term preservation rather than private whim.

The story of Charlie Bovey’s work is not one of a lone hero saving a forgotten town. It is the story of how economic cycles, individual passion, and communal action intersect to preserve a piece of history that might otherwise have vanished. As Montana’s historian K. Ross Toole once wrote, “History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our past with us. We are our history.” Charlie Bovey, in his quiet, persistent way, made sure Montana’s history was not left behind, but carried forward for the next generations to see, learn from, and judge.

See also

• Saving Montana's History at Virginia City, Madison County
• Discovery / Ellingsen Park at Virginia City, Madison County
• Madison County Pioneers at Virginia City, Madison County