Alberton, Montana

Alberton exists because a railroad president needed a place to turn a locomotive around. When the Chicago, Milwaukee, Saint Paul and Pacific Railroad was pushing its line toward the Pacific coast in the early nineteen hundreds, company president Albert J. Earling chose a flat bench on the north bank of the Clark Fork River as a division point. Homesteaders were already there. The railroad built a depot, a roundhouse, a turntable, and repair shops around them.

The town's post office opened in nineteen oh nine. By nineteen sixteen the line had been electrified, becoming one of the longest electrified railroads in North America. The town was named after the railroad president who put it on the map. Today Alberton still hugs the Clark Fork, a narrow river town celebrated locally for whitewater rafting through the gorge the Milwaukee Road once had to thread with its trains.