Kluge House: A Prussian Craft on the Montana Frontier
Near Helena, Montana
Emil Kluge was born in Prussia in eighteen forty-five and served as an infantryman in two wars before emigrating to the United States in eighteen seventy-one. He settled in Helena, Montana, in eighteen seventy-three and went to work as a contractor. In eighteen eighty-two he built the upper story of his home using a medieval German timber-frame technique called Fachwerk, creating the characteristic diagonal bracing and exposed-timber pattern typical of Prussian construction from the seventeen and eighteen hundreds.
The result is a rare surviving example of this building method in the United States. Kluge himself went on to serve the Helena community as constable and justice of the peace. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy, a rare piece of Prussian vernacular architecture that ended up on a Montana hillside because one man brought his craft across an ocean and across a continent.
