Toston, Ferry, Bridge, and the Missouri

Toston takes its name from a Norwegian immigrant, Tom Toston, who established a ranch and ferry crossing at this bend of the Missouri River in eighteen seventy-one. The location was a natural junction of two roads, one toward Helena and one toward Radersburg, and a small community quickly formed around the crossing with a post office, hotel, mercantile, and a smelter for ore from nearby mines. A bridge replaced the ferry in the eighteen nineties, and when it aged out, the state built a riveted steel Warren truss bridge here, completed in July nineteen twenty.

That span connected Helena to Bozeman on the main highway between the two cities. In nineteen forty the state added a dam just upstream, more than six hundred feet long and over fifty feet high, which has generated ten megawatts since nineteen eighty-nine.