Sunburst, Montana: Oil Town on the Prairie

Sunburst began as a farming community on the Montana-Canada border, about thirty miles north of Shelby, but in the nineteen twenties oil changed everything. The Kevin-Sunburst Oil Field was discovered in the area, and a refinery went up in nineteen twenty-two. The town incorporated in nineteen twenty-four and swelled with oil workers.

When oil development in the area wound down in the nineteen seventies, Sunburst returned to what it had always been: a farm town on the windswept plains below the Sweetgrass Hills. Its name comes from what locals describe as a dramatic sunrise, when the sun clears the Sweetgrass Hills to the east and floods the fields with light. A reminder of the boom years lives on at the local high school, whose teams are still called the Sunburst Refiners.