Townsend, Montana: Rail Stop on the Missouri

Townsend, the seat of Broadwater County, sits along the Missouri River in a valley where the first white settlers arrived in the late eighteen sixties chasing gold out of Last Chance Gulch, the gulch that would become Helena. The town itself was born in eighteen eighty-three when the Northern Pacific Railroad completed its transcontinental line and chose this stretch of the Missouri as a division point. Railroad officials named the new stop for Susan Townsend, wife of the railroad's past president, Charles Barstow Wright.

A trail connecting Helena to the Gallatin Valley ran through here, and that geography made Townsend a natural trade center. When Broadwater County was carved out in eighteen ninety-seven, Townsend became its county seat. Today the Missouri River here is impounded as Canyon Ferry Reservoir, and the broad valley that once funneled gold seekers north is now cattle ranching and recreation country.