Western Heritage Center: Montana's First Library

The twin-towered sandstone building on North Twenty-Seventh Street was a public library, opened in nineteen oh one as a memorial to Parmly Billings, the twenty-five-year-old son of the city's founding family, who died in eighteen eighty-eight. Architect Charles Haire designed it in the Richardsonian Romanesque style, all rough-cut local stone and rounded arches, a statement of civic permanence on a young frontier. The library served Billings readers for seventy years before the city outgrew it.

In nineteen seventy-one the building became the Western Heritage Center, a history museum devoted to the Yellowstone River valley and the people who shaped it. The collection now holds more than forty thousand artifacts and historic photographs documenting the Crow and Lakota nations, the cattlemen's era, the homestead boom, and the railroad corridors that tied this corner of Montana to the wider world. The building itself is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.