P a g e 3 Ghost Towns & History of MT Newsletter Susie Marr House- The small-scale simplicity of Susie Marr’s house belies the owner’s rich life. Marr emigrated from Scotland in 1870. In Virginia City, she managed household affairs for banker, William Morris, his wife, and their six children. In turn, Morris took care of Susie and gave her this house, which she shared with her brother, William Marr, a widower. The Marrs were Masons, an organization that formed a caring social circle and set Susie, a maid, and William, a store clerk, on an equal plane with more affluent community members. William, who ran unsuccessfully for sheriff, served stints as Virginia City’s postmaster and county clerk. Susie frequently visited her Masonic Sisters of the Eastern Star outside Virginia City and rubbed elbows with Montana’s elite as a Virginia City delegate to the 1893 Chicago World’s Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz Photo by Jolene Ewert-Hintz Fair. In 1910, when Susie was sixty-five, brother William died, and Susie’s employers, the Morrises, moved to Bozeman. Nevertheless, Susie remained in Virginia City for another twenty-five years, eventually bequeathing her house to the Masons and moving to the Helena Masonic Home, where she lived to age ninety-seven. -The National Register of Historic Places in cooperation with https://mhs.mt.gov/ COTTONWOOD CITY ONCE WAS MECCA OF LARGE AREA- SERVED LIVESTOCK AND MINING INTERESTS IN JUDITH BASIN Dec. 25, 1941. In the early eighties before the Lewistown of today was established and when the livestock and mining interests of the Judith basin were served by little trading points or posts scattered about that rich section of the state then far remote from lines of railroad, there was a little town about six miles south of the site of the present city of Lewistown known as Cottonwood. It was at the crossing of Cottonwood creek and boasted a post office before Lewistown became even a name. Today there is nothing to mark the old town except remnants of buildings. Among residents of Cottonwood in the early eighties was George J. Bach, who was manager of the Charles Lehman & Co., general store, and who is now living in San Diego; L. W. Eldridge, who took up a ranch and engaged in the cattle business; David L Shafer, who filed a desert claim entry upon land about a mile from the town in 1882, and Edward Brassey. Brassey was attracted to Cottonwood and afterwards located about five miles from the town, where the post office of Brassey was later established and of which he was postmaster. He moved to Lewistown and was the first school teacher in that town. The general store of Charles Lehman & Co., was one of the principal business establishments of Cottonwood, having been started by the late Charles Lehman, a pioneer merchant of Montana, whose several sons were afterwards for many years intimately connected with the various business enterprises of Lewis
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