Apgar Village: The Oldest Corner of the West Side

Apgar Village sits at the west entrance to Glacier National Park, where the Middle Fork of the Flathead River meets the foot of Lake McDonald. The handful of structures clustered here are among the oldest surviving buildings in the park, and they were not built by the federal government or the Great Northern Railway. They were built by homesteaders and fishing-resort operators who arrived in the eighteen nineties, before anyone in Washington had decided this landscape would become a national park.

Dimon Apgar came to the Lake McDonald area in eighteen ninety-two and established a small resort near the lake's western shore. His family's name attached itself to the settlement that grew around the site. Milo Apgar, his son, built cabins and a store to serve the fishermen and hunters who came into the valley before the park's establishment in nineteen ten. The structures that survive from this period, including several of the original Apgar resort buildings, are part of the Apgar Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, recognized because they represent the pre-park settlement layer that the Great Northern and the National Park Service largely erased everywhere else.

When the park was established in nineteen ten and the National Park Service began developing its infrastructure, Apgar became the western gateway. The original homestead buildings sat alongside concession structures, and later, in the nineteen sixties, the Mission Sixty-Six program that modernized National Park Service facilities across the country added a visitor center and administrative buildings in the modernist architectural vocabulary that the program favored, simple lines, flat roofs, unpretentious materials. The Mission Sixty-Six structures at Apgar represent a specific moment in the history of how the Park Service decided to present itself to the postwar American family arriving by car.

What Apgar looks like today is therefore a layered place: eighteen nineties homestead buildings, nineteen thirties Great Northern-era concessions, and nineteen sixties modernism, all within a few hundred yards of each other at the edge of a lake that predates all of them by roughly twelve thousand years.