Springhill/Dry Creek, MT
Gallatin County, one of the original nine counties established in 1865 during territorial days, was Montana’s first extensively settled agricultural area. Homesteaders followed miners in the late 1860s and established schools in private homes or one-room cabins.
Springhill is a census-designated place in Gallatin County, Montana, United States. The population was 130 at the 2010 census. It is 14 miles north of Bozeman.
* * *
* * *
Farming Near Bozeman
It is believed that John Bozeman conceived the idea of starting a colony of farmers in the Gallatin Valley to raise produce to supply the mining camps. By the end of 1863, 6000 miners were in Alder Gulch, and Virginia City had become a thriving community. Many of the settlers from the mining districts, disappointed in their quest for gold, began to realize the opportunity of supplying the mining camps with agricultural products and moved to the Gallatin Valley to establish farms. The first sales of wheat, potatoes, and other vegetables produced in the valley were made in the fall of 1864. The wagon trains passing through the Gallatin Valley on their way west provided another market for these crops and also for the cattle, sheep, and horses being raised by these first farmers. The demand was great and the prices high.
The first successful planting of wheat is usually credited to John Thomas. Thomas brought a bushel of wheat from Utah which produced fifty bushels in return on his farm north and east of Belgrade in 1864. Thomas did not sell this initial crop but held it until the next year and sold seed for $10 a bushel to area farmers. A year later, with 20,000 bushels of wheat being produced in the valley the need for mills to process the grains into flour created another commercial opportunity.The Penwell brothers in the Springhill area are often credited with building the first irrigation ditch. Running more than two miles north of Belgrade, it was built with plows and home-made scrapers as a community effort. Settlers in the Middle Creek area banded together in 1871 to form perhaps the first mutual effort in Montana, the Upper Middle Creek Ditch Company, to supply the area with water brought from the West Gallatin. The business of supplying water appeared to be profitable, and in 1888 Albert Kleinschmidt of Helena organized the Gallatin Canal Company to complete a ditch which the farmers had started on a mutual plan. The cost of $2.00 per inch was consider too high and the farmers organized the Excelsior Canal Company and built a competing ditch. Later, followed the West Gallatin Canal Company, and in 1891 the Manhattan Malting Company secured funds and set up the West Gallatin Irrigation Company to construct the large High Line Canal to serve the benches west of the Gallatin River.
* * *
Amsterdam | MT
Montana history has many episodes that involve rich eastern and foreign capitalists who rolled the dice on Montana’s resources. Typically everyone thinks of the mining and railroad corporations of the late 19th century. But in several places across the Big Sky Country, investors looked to the land itself and dreamed of agricultural bonanzas. Such is the case of Amsterdam and Church Hill (now Churchill), two rural communities in today’s rapidly suburbanizing Gallatin County. The Manhattan Malting Company was mostly a New York City venture which in the early 1890s, before the terrible depression of 1893-1896, established an industrial base on the Northern Pacific Railroad, changing the name of the town from Moreland to Manhattan. The company purchased 13,000 acres,and acquired the best in agricultural technology, the Jacob Price Field Locomotive steam plow, to till the soil. They also convinced hundred of Dutch farmers to come to Gallatin County and work the land. Even with the hard times, or perhaps because of them, people still wanted good beer, and the company prospered. By 1905 the company decided to shed itself of the land and focus on malting barley.
- Montana Historic Landscapes
