Distinctly Montana Magazine

Union Depot in 1901 Billings: I By n March of 1882, when the Northern PaWill cific Railroad laid its first tracks through Muhlenfeld what is now Billings, Montana, they had an important choice to make: where to set the track. With limited Montana Avenue in the 1920s Sugarbeet factory 80 sense of what would soon become massive growth, the surveyors made a strategic decision to draw the rail line down the center as a main artery from which the rest of the town could develop on either side. Heading westward from Minnesota, the Northern Pacific had made the same decision to "center split" other towns of the northern plains like Bismark, Fargo, and Glendive. What resulted from this seemingly rational city plan was a distinct division of the people to match that of the infrastructure. Billings and other towns along the rail route were shaped to favor one side; and naturally the other side became grounds for all kinds of trouble, poverty and competing ethnic enclaves with their own sub-cultures. This sociological phenomenon no doubt gave birth to the phrase "wrong side of the tracks." When the Northern Pacific later expanded and created new towns along its route, the model changed. They realized it made more sense to set tracks on what would be the perimeter of the future town, thus abandoning the original center-split profile. Nearly all major railways, national and international, would follow this same perimeter model into the 20th century. The original construction of the depot doomed the wrong side to be the one opposite and across its placement. Once it was decided that the depot would be built on the north side, it immediately followed that City Hall, the County Courthouse, the post office, and several churches would all be built to the north as well. Billings's population more than quadrupled in the years between 1900 and 1920. With that came other new construction that followed suit favoring the north, while the south side became a largely residential sector. The Parmly Billings Memorial Library, built in 1901, was the first building to face its back to the tracks (and the south side). Soon other buildings on the north side began to do the same and whether it was conscious or coincidental, that row of buildings along the track began to look more like a wall of separation. D I ST I NCT LY M ONTANA • SU M M E R 2013

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