Distinctly Montana Magazine

45 w w w . d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m I N A MOMENT OF ALMOST BIBLICAL RESONANCE, FATHER DE SMET PLANTED THE FIRST APPLE TREES IN THE BIT- TER ROOT VALLEY AND, INDEED, IN MONTANA, IN THE LATE 1840S. The McIntosh, a hardy variety tamed from wild apple trees found in Canada in the 18th century, would eventually thrive there, its sweet and juicy flavor accentuated by Montana's early autumn frosts. The Bitter Root filled, gradually, and finally almost alarmingly, with apple trees. By 1900, there were near- ly 300,000 apple trees in the area. The fruit born thereof would spawn an investment bubble that swelled to inordinate size. It was almost precisely at the height of that bubble when the Bitter Root Valley Irrigation Company hired forty-two-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright, then considered one of the finest architects in the nation, to design certain projects in Montana. The money men behind the BRVI were a trio of Chicago finan- ciers—W.I. Moody, L. Burns, and Frederick D. Nichols—along with Samuel Dinsmore, a local land developer who was attempt- ing to complete the legendary copper baron Marcus Daly's vi- sion of one day irrigating the benchlands of the Bitterroot and Sapphire Mountains. In service of that dream, the BRVI con- structed the Big Ditch, an irrigation network spanning some 80 miles and running from Lake Como up the benches, largely par- allel with the Bitterroot River, between 1908 and 1910. Naturally, these being men who understood the making of mon- ey, the scope of the project widened to include elements not strictly of a fruit-related nature. Como Orchard was conceived of as something like a combination time-share resort and commu- nal farm—10-acre lots were to be sold at $400 an acre to the right sort of people, largely Chicago professors and intellectuals, who would visit in the summers and eventually make 10% of the prof- it raised by the BRVI off of their parcels. If everything went well, each investor would earn passive income from their rugged, and decidedly architecturally pleasing, getaway spots. Wright was not yet the household name he would become. Those who did know him, largely avant-garde architectural cir- cles, knew him as the author of the Prairie School—organic ar- chitecture emphasizing natural materials, earth tones, and flat horizontal lines that recalled the plains of his native Midwest. It was the first indigenous American architectural movement in a field dominated by European revivals. THE APPLE AND THE ARCHITECT: FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT'S MONTANA by JOSEPH SHELTON illustrations by ROBERT RATH

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