The University on the Hill

When the Montana State Legislature created the University of Montana on February thirteenth, eighteen ninety-three, it was authorizing an institution for a town of several thousand people that did not yet have a campus, a permanent faculty, or a building to call its own. Classes began two years later, in the fall of eighteen ninety-five, with fifty students meeting in whatever space was available on the grounds of what is now a public school called Willard.

The permanent campus came gradually. The land grant Congress had set aside in eighteen eighty-one, seventy-two sections and nearly forty-six thousand acres of Montana Territory, generated revenue that funded the first buildings, designed by a Missoula architect named A. J. Gibson. Main Hall and Science Hall opened in eighteen ninety-nine. The first graduation, in June of eighteen ninety-eight, honored two students: Ella Robb Glenny and Eloise Knowles.

The campus occupies a bench at the base of Mount Sentinel, with the Clark Fork running along its southern edge. The M, a large white letter maintained by students on the face of Sentinel, is one of the more visible landmarks in the valley. The university has shaped Missoula in ways that extend well beyond enrollment numbers. It brought writers, scientists, and artists into a timber-and-rail economy. The creative writing program it eventually developed became one of the most respected in the country. And the students it kept in Missoula after graduation gave the city a cultural character distinct from other Montana communities of similar size, a college town instinct for argument and arts that has persisted long past the logging era.