P a g e 3 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r 20,000 People a year visit Tinsley House to learn about homesteading in Montana By Evelyn Boswell, MSU News Service– JULY 8, 2013 BOZEMAN –A log house carrying memories from the homesteading days of Montana merged into traffic and joined the cars and trucks streaming east on Interstate 90. As angry drivers backed up behind it, the slow-moving Tinsley House rolled from Three Forks to Belgrade, south to Four Corners and east to Bozeman before settling next to Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies in 1986. “I could always tell the progress we’d made each day by the angry phone calls,” said Michael Hager, head of the museum at that time and now president and CEO of the San Diego Natural History Museum. “We backed up traffic for 30 miles on the interstate and truckers were really mad. Then, when it arrived in Bozeman, if trees or mailboxes were in the way, they were removed and a stack of firewood was left for the homeowners along the street.” “We started off with a sign on the back of the home that said, ‘Follow me to the Museum of the Rockies,’” Hager said. “Charles Kuralt did a national news story about it. We took it off after the angry phone calls started coming in.” Sentiments changed, however, after renovators prepared the Tinsley House for more company than it had seen in a century near Willow Creek. Twenty-four years after opening to the public, the Tinsley House now attracts 20,000 people a year who are curious about homesteading life between 1860 and 1910, said David Kinsey, manager of the Living History Farm. Among them have been Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, movie stars and the producers of the PBS reality show “Frontier House.” “My vision was that the homestead would allow us to tell a very important story of Montana settlement and agriculture in a way that would generate a great deal of public interest,” Hager said. “But I had no idea it would be so wonderful and so important to the educational program of the museum.” Shelley McKamey, current director of the Museum of the Rockies, said, “Many people came to Montana in the first wave of homesteaders in the 1880s and 1890s and many of them were involved in agriculture. Helping students and visitors understand what life was actually like at this time in Montana’s history is an important part of the Museum’s mission. Whenever kids can connect with the past in a tangible way, it
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