Historic laundry celebrates 100 years

It may not seem as pressing as the need for food or shelter, but clean clothes are a basic necessity for most people. It’s a need that has kept the High Country Linen building churning out fresh, clean laundry and linens for a century.

High Country is celebrating its 100th anniversary, and it has remained a laundry facility for all one hundred of those years.

“The building was a laundry in 1919 and it’s a laundry today,” High Country Linen General Manager Ward Clark said. “I like to say the only thing that’s really changed are the trucks.”

The original trucks are commemorated in black-and-white photographs hanging on the laundry’s old brick walls. Early employees pose next to the trucks in front of the building’s brick façade, which looks nearly identical to the High Country Linen entrance today. The “1919 Laundry” sign can still be seen from the company’s building on First Avenue East.

“It’s still all in all the same thing,” Clark said. “We try to keep the continuity of the valley.”

Kalispell American Laundry launched in 1919, and although the business changed hands multiple times before High Country Linen took over in 1989, the core business of laundry and dry cleaning has remained the same.

Today, High Country Linen provides personal dry cleaning and linen supply for hotels and restaurants, as well as private individuals such as people hosting large family reunions.

It’s essentially the same business model from the days when wooden trucks delivered clean laundry to customers around the city, except today High Country Linen uses high-tech machinery to clean thousands of pieces of laundry every day.

“The building wasn’t designed to do this volume,” Clark pointed out. “The valley’s grown so much.

“What we did in one week’s volume when I first started [in 1989] is equivalent to one route today, and we do six routes,” he said.

To accommodate the area’s growing population, the laundry has expanded and updated its machinery. High Country Linen grew into a neighboring space where a car wash used to be, and it has significantly renovated the building to accommodate state-of-the-art technology.

Now, High Country Linen operates a multi-level filtration system to purify its sewer discharge. It’s also equipped with a clothing rack that automatically sorts laundry and a washer-extractor that agitates laundry with the force of hundreds of Gs — for comparison, an F-16 fighter jet can withstand a maximum of nine Gs.

But largely unnoticed above these high-tech devices is the building’s original tin roof, and clients still deposit their dirty laundry in the drop box next to the front door, even though the ancient contraption no longer closes completely.

“I tried to get it back to where it was,” said Clark, who has worked hard to preserve the building’s integrity while modernizing the operation.

He recognizes that his is hardly a one-of-a-kind business, and the 100-year-old laundry business has outlasted many competitors.

“I like to say ‘we’re not the best because we’re the oldest, we’re the oldest because we’re the best,’” he said.

He believes their commitment to service has kept the business going for so many years. They’ve implemented measures such as driving a truck to a larger facility in Great Falls every day to be able to accommodate increased loads. “I think a big part of our group is our care and our service,” he pointed out.

And even with the increase of washers and dryers in people’s homes, Clark believes the somewhat old-fashioned business has endured because it’s an important service for the community and the environment. “We’re the natural recyclers,” he pointed out. “We’re not throwing everything away.”

And after so many decades, he believes, “We’re part of the community.”

In the 20th-century photos of the building, an old clock can be seen hanging above the entryway, below the brick “laundry” sign. Eventually, Clark said the clock fell into disuse and sat motionless above the front door, only displaying the correct time twice a day.

Clark took over as general manager in December 2004 and refurbished the clock, which now illuminates the laundry’s front office with brand-new neon tubing. Time has passed and a few updates have been made, but the historic laundry building remains largely unchanged.

Reporter Bret Serbin may be reached at758-4459 or bserbin@dailyinterlake.com.