From Butte's copper empire to Bannack's ghost town streets, Montana's history is written in mining booms, Native American heritage, frontier justice, and the railroad towns that connected a vast and uncompromising landscape.
Montana became a territory in 1864 on the strength of gold at Bannack and Virginia City. Within a generation, Butte was producing a quarter of the world's copper — a company town run by the Anaconda Copper Mining Company that employed more than ten thousand men underground. The National Register preserves nearly sixty sites across the state. These ten span the full arc of Montana's history: ghost towns that boomed and emptied, copper-era mansions, Native American heritage sites, and the landscapes that defined the American frontier imagination.
Butte was once the largest city between Chicago and San Francisco — a cosmopolitan mining camp with neighborhoods organized by ethnicity: Cornish, Irish, Finnish, Chinese, Serbian, Lebanese. At its peak it produced a quarter of the world's copper. The historic district preserves the architecture of that concentration of industrial wealth: commercial blocks, labor union halls, and copper-era mansions.
View full record →Gold was discovered at Bannack in 1862, triggering Montana's first rush. Within a year it was the territorial capital. Within a decade it was fading. Bannack's sheriff Henry Plummer ran a secret outlaw gang that murdered over a hundred people before vigilantes hanged him in 1864. Today sixty structures survive in arrested decay, preserved as a state park.
View full record →Anaconda was founded in 1883 by Marcus Daly specifically to smelt Butte's copper ore. The Anaconda Company's 585-foot smokestack — the tallest masonry structure in the world when built in 1919 — still stands as a state park landmark. The town was a company town in the literal sense: Daly's company built the hospital, the hotel, and the school.
View full record →Charles Marion Russell came to Montana in 1880 at seventeen, worked as a cowboy for eleven years, and became the defining visual artist of the American West. The museum in Great Falls preserves his home, log cabin studio, and over two thousand works. Russell documented a way of life — open range cattle ranching, Blackfeet ceremonies, buffalo hunts — that was vanishing as he painted it.
View full record →William Andrews Clark was one of the three Copper Kings who controlled Butte's mines in the 1880s. His thirty-four-room Victorian mansion, completed in 1888, was the most expensive private residence in Montana — a deliberate display of mining wealth in a city built on extraction. It survives as the most intact copper-era mansion in the state.
View full record →Chief Plenty Coups was the last great chief of the Crow Nation, who led his people through the treaty era by advocating alliance with the United States rather than armed resistance. He donated his home and land at Pryor to the Crow people and the state before his death in 1932. The park preserves his house, a trading post, and a spring considered sacred by the Crow.
View full record →John Bozeman blazed the Bozeman Trail in 1863 to connect the Oregon Trail to Montana's goldfields, cutting through Sioux and Cheyenne territory in violation of existing treaties. The town he founded became a commercial hub for the Gallatin Valley after the mining rush faded. The historic district preserves its Victorian-era commercial core.
View full record →Carroll College was founded in 1909 by the Catholic Diocese of Helena in Last Chance Gulch — the gold placer that started Montana's capital city. The campus historic district preserves the mission-revival and collegiate gothic buildings that defined Catholic higher education in the Mountain West through the first half of the twentieth century.
View full record →The Northern Pacific Railroad reached the Yellowstone Valley in 1882 and platted Billings on the spot — it became Montana's largest city within a decade. The downtown historic district preserves the commercial blocks built during the railroad-era boom: warehouses, banks, and the Montana Building, which housed the first electric elevator in the state.
View full record →Montana's first territorial capital, where the 1864 vigilante hangings of outlaw sheriff Henry Plummer established frontier justice by rope. Sixty structures survive in arrested decay — the hotel, the masonic lodge, the jail, the gallows site — making Bannack one of the most intact ghost towns in the American West.
View full record →This collection covers 10 highlights. There are 99 documented sites across Montana on Vestiga — buildings, landmarks, graveyards, and homesteads from every corner of the state.