Malta and the Plan That Preceded the New Deal

Malta grew up fast on the northern Montana plains when the homestead boom of the nineteen tens sent thousands of farmers onto land that had been open range. The Montana Legislature created Phillips County in nineteen fifteen with Malta as the county seat, and for a few harvests the rains cooperated and the wheat came in golden.

Then drought arrived in nineteen eighteen and did not relent. Farms failed by the hundreds. By the mid-nineteen twenties, Malta's Commercial Club was drafting what became known as the Malta Plan: a federal program to buy out failed farms, consolidate the abandoned acreage into managed grazing land, and resettle struggling homesteaders in the more reliable Milk River Valley. It was an early, locally-designed version of land-use policy that the New Deal would adopt nationally a decade later.

Malta today serves the surrounding ranch country as a supply town and is the seat of Phillips County. Dinosaur fossils discovered in the surrounding badlands, including Leonardo, a remarkably well-preserved duck-billed dinosaur, have added paleontology tourism to its economy.