GARRISON, Montana Community Information

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  Photo courtesy: John Ansotegui

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  Photo courtesy: John Ansotegui

Garrison is named for William Lloyd Garrison, an anti-slavery leader. Perhaps some Yankee veteran from the Civil War had come for the gold rush and settled in the valley and named it after the man he most admired. It developed into a railroad town tucked in between the Clark Fork River and a high bluff. The Northern Pacific trains from Butte and Helena met there and continued on to Missoula as one line. (from Cheney's Names on the Face of Montana, Mountain Press Publishing Company)

Garrison is not far from the 1,500-acre Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Deer Lodge, which illustrates the development of the Northern Plains cattle industry from the 1850s to recent times. This was the headquarters area of one of the largest and best known 19th-century range ranches in the country. Today the ranch house, bunkhouse and outbuildings are much as they were during ranch operations from the 1860s through the 1960s.