Drummond, Montana

Drummond was a ranching settlement before it was a town. The first cattle outfits arrived in the Clark Fork valley before the railroad, and when the Northern Pacific Railroad pushed through in eighteen eighty-three, they platted a formal townsite facing the tracks and gave it the name Drummond. The Northern Pacific's stockyards became the destination ranchers across Granite County used for decades, driving their herds down from the surrounding hills for loading.

A second railroad arrived in nineteen oh seven and nineteen oh eight: the Milwaukee Road, also following the Clark Fork on its way between Butte and Missoula. Served by two transcontinental lines and later by United States Highway Ten through the center of town, Drummond became a reliable shipping and supply point in a landscape that remains largely working ranch country today. Residents here have been sending cattle east by rail and truck for the better part of a hundred and forty years. The town took its name from Edwardsville, and sources differ on whether Drummond honors a Northern Pacific engineer or a local trapper named Hugh Drummond. It sits at three thousand nine hundred fifty four feet of elevation. Its population peaked at five hundred seventy seven in nineteen sixty and stood at two hundred seventy two in twenty twenty. Every July the town still holds its professional rodeo, which marked its eighty fourth year in twenty twenty five.