Grant-Kohrs Ranch Foundation

Researched, authored and posted November 17, 2016 by author Patricia Nell Warren

 RANCH HOUSE 1865

Researched, authored and posted November 17, 2016 by author Patricia Nell Warren

Long before barbed-wire fences began to be strung across the vast distances of Montana ranges, early-day stockraisers laboriously put up pole fences around modest pastures near their homes. Here is the Grant-Kohrs ranch house in 1865, portrayed by Granville Stuart in a pencil drawing. The nearby pasture is circled by jackleg fencing, probably constructed from local lodgepole pine -- the same straight dependable pine tree that furnished poles for tribal lodges like the ones beside the house. John Grant cherished his horses, especially favorites like Cream and others he wrote about in his memoirs. He was concerned about their straying or being stolen. Hence the effort put into one of the first fences in the Deer Lodge Valley. (Photo by National Park Service)

Researched, authored and posted  by author Patricia Nell Warren on February 10, 2014

Jackleg fences at the Grant ranch in 1865, as detailed in a Granville Stuart drawing. This type of fence was valued by 19th-century Western settlers because it wasn’t affected by winter heaving of moist ground as it froze and thawed. It was easy to build – didn’t require the digging of post holes. Some historians ascribe its origins to the eastern regions of North America and their use of split-rail fences.

Western settlers went to using native lodgepole pine because it was plentiful and durable and saved them from having to split rails. A settler did need a keg of big nails with which to secure the poles to the upright jacks.

Metis settlers like Grant were familiar with the usability of lodgepole pine through their connections with the tribes, who used these poles for their skin lodges. The drawing shows two lodges in front of the Grant house. Tradition says that one of them belonged to Grant's wife's mother.

(National Park Service photo from GRKO website at
http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/grko/hrs/hsr1.htm)

Researched, authored and posted April 16, 2016 by author Patricia Nell Warren

John Grant wrote: "In the fall of 1862, I built a house in Cottonwood, afterward called Deer Lodge. It cost me a pretty penny. I hauled lumber from the Flat Head reserve, which was 150 miles away. The house was made of hewed logs with posts in the corner. It was 64 feet long, 30 feet wide and 16 feet high. I paid $5 a day to McLeod the hewer, and to the carpenter Alexander Pambrun I paid $9 a day....I had only homemade furniture at first, but after four or five years I bought Captain Labarge's freight and among the lot there were some parlor chairs."

Grant didn't mention adding the clapboard facing on the house, but he was the one who added it -- along with the many panes of window glass shipped from St. Louis at great expense. The Grant ranch house's architectural style was patterned after structures built by the Hudson's Bay Company in Canada. It is said to have been the first such residential building in the territory. The front porch was added by the Kohrses sometime before 1885, and the brick addition came in 1890.

(Photo by Jacklynn Matthews

Researched, authored and posted April 16, 2016 by author Patricia Nell Warren

RANCH HOUSE 1866

The ranch got its startup around 1861, when Canadian Métis trader John Grant moved to this spot with his family and livestock. The Grants lived in a quick-built log cabin (now the bunkhouse) while a crew of Métis carpenters built the big ranch house, completed in 1862. It served as both Grant's home and trading post, and is said to be the first frame house built in Montana Territory. Sheds and jackleg fences were added as needed. From this spot, John Grant carried on extensive herding and trading of cattle and horses, as well as launching various mercantile businesses in the growing nearby community of Deer Lodge City. Quarra Grant, his wife, was a sister of Lemhi Shoshone chief Tendoy, so First Nation peoples were frequent visitors and trading customers at the ranch.

In 1866, Grant moved his family back to Canada, after selling the ranch to German immigrant Conrad Kohrs, who was developing a chain of butcher shops through Montana's gold camps. Kohrs and his brother/business partner John Bielenberg carried on with both cattle and horse raising, expanding their business enormously when railroad building finally made it possible to ship their beef out of the region to national meat-packing markets. With the deaths of Kohrs and Bielenberg in 1920 and 1922, the ranch was temporarily downsized into caretaker status for a while, as part of the Kohrs estate, but it got a new lease on life with Kohrs's grandson Con Warren and his wife Nellie in the 1930s.

The Warrens modernized the ranch, but also preserved its historic integrity, getting it listed with the National Registry of Historic Places. They eventually sold part of the historic complex to the National Park Service in 1972. After several years of restoration and adding needed amenities, the site had its gala public opening in 1977. Con Warren completed sale of the property to the Park Service when he retired from ranching in 1982.

(1866 sketch by Granville Stuart, courtesy of National Park Service)

Researched, authored and posted August 18, 2016 by author Patricia Nell Warren

RANCH HOUSE 1885

The Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site, established in 1972, celebrates the contribution of family ranching to our nation's history, and to the history of the Americas. Visitors can find much to see and do there. It's a real working ranch that has been in continuous existence since 1861, with heritage breeds of livestock whose care includes old-time agricultural activities like haying with horse teams. Ranch management takes place in the magnificent natural setting of a historic river, cottonwood groves, hayfields and pastures, and a complex of historic buildings. This 1883 view of the ranch, featuring the magnificent ranch house that still exists, was published in Leeson's "History of Montana." For more information, go to: https://www.nps.gov/grko/index.htm

Researched, authored and posted March 10, 2015 by author Patricia Nell Warren

By 1885, when the Kohrs/Bielenberg ranch was featured in Leeson's "History of Montana," the house had been transformed into the traditional European country manse, surrounded by a park with orderly plantings of shade trees. The tree of choice was the native black cottonwood (Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa), whose stately galleries already lined the river and creek bottoms in the distance. Since black cottonwoods are fast-growing and have a straight central trunk, they lent themselves to the formal plantings favored by the West's immigrant Victorians. To keep these water-loving cottonwoods well-watered on the higher elevation where the house stood, the family laced the enclosed yard with an elaborate irrigation system.

Cottonwoods, being soft-wood trees, are not as long-lived as hardwoods. The oldest cottonwood noted by science was 400 years old, but typically their life span is more like 100-120 years. The individuals shown in this illustration were still thriving magnificently in 1945, when Augusta Kohrs passed on -- though they began to die off by the time the National Park Service acquired the property. Today the Park Service is restoring that 1885-1945 look with plantings of new young cottonwoods in the yard.

(Photo of illustration by unknown artist, from Leeson's History of Montana/Wikipedia Commons)

Researched, authored and posted February 9, 2015 by author Patricia Nell Warren

Look closely at this 1885 view of the Grant-Kohrs Ranch. At the center, between the bunkhouse and the shed next door, you'll see a birdhouse sticking up. It was installed by the Kohrses and John Bielenberg to attract purple martins, which are world-champion insect-eaters. The family hoped these martins would go to war on the fierce mosquitos that infested the river bottoms. Harmony with wildlife, which the GRKO practices today as a national park, is a tradition that goes way back on the ranch. (Illustration from Leeson's "History of Montana" (1885)

Researched, authored and posted September 30, 2014 by author Patricia Nell Warren

The brick wing was added to the Grant-Kohrs ranchhouse 124 years ago. "In the summer of 1890," Conrad Kohrs wrote in his Autobiography, "we began remodeling and putting an addition to our house, which was not completed till after the holidays....The new addition to the house proved a great comfort. The furnace, water-works and gas plant gave us all the conveniences of the city and lightened the burdens of the housekeeper perceptibly -- no carrying of wood for six or seven stoves, and the filling of lamps."

This addition also added greatly to the grandeur of the house, as enjoyed by visitors today. It included the sitting room, dining room, greenhouse, pantry and large kitchen, along with the magnificent porch and the spacious food storage and prep area in the basement. (National Park Service photo)

Quote from "Conrad Kohrs: An Autobiography," edited by Conrad Kohrs Warren (Platen Press, 1977).

Researched, authored and posted December 19, 2013 by author Patricia Nell Warren

View of the west end of the Grant-Kohrs ranch house – the brick addition built in 1890 by the Kohrs family. The stone-walled entrance goes into the spacious dry airy basement dug into the hill, where the house stood on the edge of a higher elevation. The basement was the heart of food storage for the ranch, with its meat and dairy cooler, commissary, root cellar, milk-separation facility, etc. That doorway into the basement was always busy this time of year, with extra cooking for the holidays.

The road up the hill leads to the bunkhouse.

(Photo taken by Skyworks, when they came to the Grant-Kohrs Ranch to do their aerial video.