Eureka: Tobacco Valley's Almost County Seat

The town now called Eureka started life in nineteen oh three as Deweyville, named by its founders for one of their wives. Three months later, when they discovered another Dewey already existed in Montana, they changed the name to the universal miner's cry of good fortune. The Great Northern Railway arrived in nineteen oh four, and within a year the Eureka Lumber Company was running its saws.

When Lincoln County was carved out in nineteen oh nine, Eureka squared off against Libby for the county seat and won the special election by eighteen votes. Then the Montana Supreme Court reversed the result in nineteen eleven and gave the seat to Libby. Eureka kept on logging.

The town sits in the Tobacco Valley, a glacially carved basin near the Canadian border, where the Tobacco River still runs through farmland that smells nothing like tobacco but takes the name from the native tobacco that Indigenous people grew on the Tobacco Plains.