Student project provides key component for new history museum exhibit

A train is on its way to the Northwest Montana History Museum in Kalispell. 

Arrival time will be announced as the museum assembles crews together to design a new permanent exhibit — a model railroad and locomotive display highlighting the timber industry, namely Somer’s Sawmill, the largest in the valley in the 1900s. The Great Northern Railway came to town to build an 11-mile railroad line to the sawmill. In return, the railroad was supplied with railroad ties. 

“It was a spur line that went from Somers up to Kalispell,” museum volunteer curator Jane Renfrow said, with timber one of the first major commodities in the valley. “There was a timber famine going on in the rest of the United States.” 

The display will also include models of Kalispell’s iconic historic buildings including Central School and the historic Flathead County Courthouse which recent Glacier High School graduate Brec Gibson designed as part of an internship through Kalispell Public School’s work-based learning program. 

The display will be installed in the “timber room” at the museum, which showcases the history of the logging industry in the Flathead Valley and is the museum’s oldest permanent exhibit. One of the main features of the gallery is a circular sawmill, which will remain. 

The display will depict the area in the 1940s to 1950s based on the era of the model locomotive and cars belonging to Ken Ross of Helena and donated to the museum by his wife after he passed away. 

Museum board member and project team member Bill Dakin has a few local model railroad hobbyists lined up to design the landscape and people and paint the model buildings.  

“We are working with a muralist to get, to modify in a way, the hills that lie west of Somers all the way to Lone Pine … that will be the backdrop,” Dakin said. 

As part of the renovation, false wood-paneled walls installed with the original exhibit were removed, exposing windows and natural light. 

“And we gained about 250 square feet of display area,” Dakin said. 

Along with the static model railroad display the museum plans to set up an interactive train display where visitors can push buttons to set two model trains in motion. 

In addition to the model train donation, the idea to renovate the timber gallery was spurred by a wrinkle in the vinyl timeline displayed on the wall. When museum volunteers noticed the wrinkle, they zoned in on the dates. 

“The timeline ended at 1998. A lot has happened since 1998,” Dakin said. “… all kinds of new forest products are made here like SmartLam’s fiberboard products. And we have a lot more photos that we want to showcase.”  

Once the decision to refresh the museum gallery was made, Dakin sought community members to help create the display.  

“I wanted to figure out how to make a scale-appropriate model of this building [Central School] and the courthouse,” Dakin said. “We don't have room to replicate the town of Kalispell, even as it was in 1950. So we just have to have a representation of it and these are the two probably most widely known, iconic buildings in the town other than the Conrad Mansion but to accurately depict the Conrad Mansion would take a city block.” 

When it came time to find someone to create the building models, he thought the school district was an option. He learned that Mike Kelly, director of work-based learning at Kalispell Public Schools was the person to contact and happened to be in his Rotary Club.  

Kelly organizes internships and apprenticeships for students by matching their interests with the needs of employers in the valley. Internships can be a semester or a year, paid or unpaid. Apprenticeships, typically in the trades, that culminate in certification can take multiple years. 

“We’re really trying to personalize education for the students in high school and have them in the driver’s seat as much as possible,” Kelly said. “Yes, that doesn’t mean your competency courses go to the wayside. You still have to take those courses, but what we do is try to make a more flexible schedule to where they don’t always have to be in the school building. There’s a lot of education that goes on our in our community outside the four walls of the school building.” 

“It makes the educational piece of the classroom applicable,” Kelly later said. “This is why I need to know algebra. This is why I need to have a command of the English language.” 

Kelly also added that it’s a partnership with the community to grow the local workforce. 

“In the future, you know, we want our children to be able to stay and carve out a living here, or, if they need to leave to go get further education, that they will be able to then come back to our valley,” Kelly said. 

Gibson, who is planning to pursue a degree in architecture, was looking for an internship when Kelly proposed the museum’s project. Gibson, who is interested in specializing in historical architecture, took on the opportunity. 

First, he obtained copies of building blueprints to convert measurements to the popular model railroad scale called the HO scale (1:87).  

“I measured everything out with a ruler. I wrote down all the measurements and converted those through a calculator to HO scale, or I then could just put it into the CAD [computer-aided design] modeling,” Gibson said.  Some parts of it were a little more complex, as you see with primarily the courthouse, which I did in two weeks on a rush.” 

During a recent interview at the museum, he brought along two 3D-printed models to show. He estimates the two model buildings represent about 100 hours of work total. He said the final versions will be printed from Glacier’s larger, more sophisticated 3D printer. 

“They recently updated the nozzle for it so it’s more accurate with its details and such,” he said. 

Gibson’s interest in designing models was piqued when he started using an online platform called Roblox where users can program games. After a while, he found Roblox capabilities limiting. 

“You have a very limited range on that app, so you kind of have to go to different software to get all the details you want which kind of brought me into the CAD environment,” he said. 

CAD allowed him to get detailed and he started taking engineering classes.  

“I made a very small French chateau-esque building, which was my first kind of experience with actual buildings, but that was not any sort of scale,” Gibson said. 

By graduation, he completed enough engineering classes to earn the engineering distinction. 

In the fall, Gibson plans to attend Flathead Valley Community College to complete his general education, transferring to the University of Colorado — Denver to complete a degree in architecture. 

During the interview at the museum, Gibson, Dakin and Kelly sat around a table pitching ideas to expand on Gibson’s internship project to business and art students. It could provide an entrepreneurship project to create models of the railroad for sale in the museum store providing lessons in developing a business model, how to make money and how to project sales.  

“But also students who are very interested in art or curating those kinds of things might be the students that we can develop internships for through work-based learning and continuing the museum partnership to have students build upon the railroad exhibit,” Kelly said.  

Currently, there are more than 125 professionals/employers in the valley willing to host a high school intern Kelly said.  

Reporter Hilary Matheson may be reached at 758-4431 or hmatheson@dailyinterlake.com. 

    Brec Gibson's two 3D-printed, HO scale replicas of the historic Flathead County Courthouse building and Central School at the Northwest Montana History Museum on Tuesday, July 9. (Casey Kreider/Daily Inter Lake)
 Casey Kreider