History in motion

The oldest edifices of the Flathead Valley are an integral part of the local landscape. And if one of them is torn down or moved, people take notice.

That was clearly the case a few weeks ago when a bit of local history was raised from its foundation of the past 45 years and took a trip through town en route to its new location nearly 30 miles away.

The 40-by-40-foot wooden shop was built by longtime Flathead Valley resident Howard Ramsey in the early 1960s at his property at the intersection of North Meridian and Three Mile Drive.

His daughter, Margaret Howard, and granddaughter, Glenda Dylina Brown, recall that Howard, a retired highway patrolman, was in the first class to graduate from the newly formed Montana Highway Patrol Academy about 1936-37. He retired at age 52, after suffering a massive heart attack.

After retiring, Ramsey built the structure from salvaged material to house a 35-foot Chris-Craft cabin cruiser. He bought the boat after it had sunk in Lake Mead and was planning on restoring it.

It took him two or three years to build the shop which he did on his own from two-by-fours salvaged from an independent sawmill near Kila. Margaret remembers using as seats the kegs her father had bought filled with nails for the construction. The kegs were purchased at the KM Mercantile, which at that time sold everything from harnesses for horses to hardware. She says her father used to say that if anybody ever wanted to tear down his building, they'd have a tough time with all the nails he'd hammered into it.

Ramsey used two-by-sixes to build the roof beams, wetting them down in order to get them to bow and laminating four together for each beam. Brown was a young girl when her grandfather was building his shop and remembers playing on the arches that he would later raise for the domed roof.

The shop's floor was built of 3-inch-long 2-by-4 stubs stood up on end and sunk side by side into the dirt.

Ramsey's father was an oil driller in Shelby. After moving to the Flathead in the late 20s, William Ramsey became a water-well driller and was responsible for many wells in the West Valley and Whitefish area. For a time, he and his wife Jesse lived in the original homestead house that was on the property at the time it was purchased by a family member and dated as far back as the 1800s. The homestead was later torn down due to safety concerns, and Howard then built a cedar log house on the property for him and his wife, Pat, who was a dispatcher for the Kalispell Police Department for many years. That home was later moved to the Kila area.

Howard Ramsey died in 1986, before his fishing boat was completely restored. The building's new owner, Peter Gross, plans to convert the structure into an airplane hangar at his property west of Marion where it will showcase some of the vintage aircraft he is restoring. That would suit her dad just fine, says Howard's daughter. When her father was younger, he had bought a wrecked Piper Cub and completely restored it. He then learned how to fly and flew that plane and later a newer, faster plane above the Flathead for many years.