Alberton, Montana
At the dawn of the 20th century, the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway,better known as the Milwaukee Road,pushed west in search of a line to the Pacific. Surveyors threaded the tracks through the tight Clark Fork River canyon just west of Missoula, where company president Albert J. Earling personally selected a site on the river’s north bank for a future division point. Only two homesteading families were in residence then: Henry and Catherine Brown, working the slim benchland since 1891, and Amadie and Phoebe Agnes Poirier, who had filed claim in 1899.
The railroad needed room for a right‑of‑way, a terminal, and yards to service its cutting‑edge steam locomotives. After completing a survey in 1907, construction crews broke ground on the Alberton Terminal Station in 1908 and finished it the following year,part of a coast‑to‑coast line built in a record three years. The stop, complete with bunkrooms for train crews, was first christened “Browntown.”
Milwaukee Road trains were famous for their bold orange‑and‑yellow paint scheme, a color duo still on display today in the authentic boxcar parked at the Alberton Town Museum. The town welcomed its first Milwaukee steam engine in 1909; by 1916, that same line was humming under electric power. Generations of local children grew up beneath the overhead wires, warned by anxious mothers not to “cross the line” where rails split the town’s only road.
False‑front, frontier‑era buildings along Railroad Avenue still echo those boom years. Yet Alberton’s landscape bears even older scars. During the last Ice Age, a 2,000‑foot‑high ice dam near the Idaho–Montana border blocked the Clark Fork, forming Glacial Lake Missoula,an inland sea that stretched 200 miles east and submerged the future town beneath hundreds of feet of water. When the dam finally burst, cataclysmic floods carved the valley; the Natural Pier Bridge stands today as evidence of that violent scouring.
Alberton incorporated in 1920, electing Elmer Slater as its first mayor. Modern conveniences followed: cement sidewalks replaced boardwalks in 1925, municipal electricity arrived in 1929, and telephones in 1954. Although freight service ended in 1986, residents insist the railroad’s can‑do spirit still pulses through the town.
One of Alberton’s most poignant stories belongs to Orville Grant Willett, a local son who became the first state senator from newly formed Mineral County in 1915. Stricken with leprosy while serving in Helena two years later, Willett and his wife were quarantined in a small house 2½ miles west of town,today the site of an eastbound Interstate rest area,for more than five years before transferring to the national leprosarium in Carville, Louisiana. He died on January 10, 1928.
The community’s 104‑year‑old landmark later known as the Ghost Rails Inn survived countless passing trains only to be lost to a Christmas Eve fire in 2013. Yet each third Saturday of July, Alberton honors its enduring railroad heritage with Alberton Railroad Day,a lively celebration of the iron road that gave the town its start.