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Border to Border

For over two decades, volunteers from across Montana registered local quilts as a part of the Montana Historic Quilt Project. The quilts chronicle Montana's history over the last 150 years, telling the stories of statehood, the struggle for women's suffrage, two world wars, the Great Depression, as well as the recent past. This highly illustrated book showcases the Montana's best, most unique, and most interesting quilts and describes the life and times of the extraordinary people who made them. Border to Border: Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana is an invaluable addition to quilting literature and to Montana history.

  • Over 150 rich, full-color photography of quilts
  • Over 50 historical photographs
  • Authentic, well-researched histories of individual quilts and quiltmakers

Excerpt:
(from foreword)

  

Border to Border: Quilts and Quiltmakers of Montana is the culmination of the efforts of dozens, probably even hundreds, of quilters dedicated to preserving Montana's quilt legacy. Although they might not have known it, the Montana Historic Quilt Project volunteers were making significant contributions to the study of history by tracking folk art objects made traditionally by women. We tend to think that historians spend all of their time researching in the archives, pouring through boxes and boxes of written records. But increasingly scholars who study the past are looking at the things people made as well as the writings they left behind.
Folklorist Henry Glassie, one of the earliest proponents of this type of research explained the value of including everyday objects in our study of the past: "Few people write. Everyone makes things. An exceptional minority has created the written record. The landscape is the product of the divine average." In other words, history becomes more democratic, more inclusive, if we look at things made by normal, everyday people.
In this context, quilts are extremely valuable because they have traditionally been made by women, a group that for a long time was left out of the study of history. Even if women left behind fewer written records than men in the past, looking at quilts allows scholars to trace changing technologies, aesthetics, and cultural values over time and to add women back into the story of American history.
I appreciate quilts for the contribution they can make to our understanding of American history, but in the process of researching and writing this book, I came to love Montana's quilts not because of their larger meanings but simply because they offer a starting point for telling individual stories. Ordinary Montanans did as much as the prominent ones to shape the history of the state, and their stories deserve greater recognition. In little snapshots, quilts made or brought here by everyday folk tell the story of Montana that you never fully understand when you read about Lewis and Clark, General Custer, or the Copper Kings.
 
Montana Place Names

Among Montana's most enduring legacies are the names assigned to her geographic features and places found on the state map. As long as humans have inhabited Montana they have named places. While the past two centuries have changed the way people live in Montana, the names given to rivers, mountain ranges, cities, and towns have persisted. Montana Place Names explores the origins of more than 1,000 Montana place names, drawing upon the knowledge of Montana Historical Society historians and the expertise of local historians from across the state. This new publication includes both geographic features, selected historic sites listed on the National Register of Historic Places, historic photographs, and maps. The authors' extensive research illuminates the stories behind the names of places that we call home.

 

Excerpt:

 
Since the early nineteenth century, explorers and surveyors placed names on their maps of the region of North America that would become Montana Territory in 1864. Among the earliest mapmakers, Lewis and Clark arrived in 1804 -1806, David Thompson of the North West Fur Company followed shortly. Geographic features dominate those maps, especially rivers and mountain ranges. Father Pierre DeSmet, a Jesuit missionary, arrived on the scene in the 1840s. The first towns appear on Walter W. DeLacy's 1865 map, commissioned by the first Territorial Legislature. In just over half a century the Montana map sprouted hundreds of new names, created by hundreds of thousands of homesteaders who poured into the state seeking cheap land. The railroads promoted homesteading and offered up a wide array of names, some associated with railroad executives but others plucked off a world atlas, such as Sumatra and Malta. Between 1900 and 1918, Montana's population more than tripled, but drought during the 1920s and 1930s prompted a mass exodus from eastern Montana, and the current Montana highway map reflects the steep decline in population; hundreds of towns have disappeared reflecting a shift in the state's economy from mining, timbering, and small farms to a service economy and much larger farms and ranches served by regional commercial centers.

This new traveler's guide explores the origins of more than 1,100 Montana place names, drawing upon the knowledge of Montana Historical Society historians and the Society's extensive collection of historic maps and newspapers, as well as the expertise of local and county historians.

Montana is a vast landscape, its history and significance unknown to many, both to the native and the interested tourist. Clues to the meaning of the past can be found in the names that grace the contemporary Montana highway map, and this guidebook strives to illuminate some of the mysteries. The following entries document the names as we currently know then, and whenever possible, include both the history of the present name, as well as any and all previous names.