INTRO

[NARRATOR]: It’s a wet late summer day in Noxon. The three grassy lots where most of the town’s businesses once stood are partially cordoned off with yellow tape. A pickup truck is parked in front of the trailer that now houses a diminished Angry Beaver General Store, but Noxon Avenue, the community’s main drag, is otherwise quiet.

Before Feb. 27, 2024, this short stretch of road was home to four storefronts: The Angry Beaver, the Mercantile and Cafe, and Toby’s Tavern, a Noxon fixture beloved across Northwest Montana. Now only Johnson Hardware, just across Broadway Street from …

INTRO

[NARRATOR]: It’s a wet late summer day in Noxon. The three grassy lots where most of the town’s businesses once stood are partially cordoned off with yellow tape. A pickup truck is parked in front of the trailer that now houses a diminished Angry Beaver General Store, but Noxon Avenue, the community’s main drag, is otherwise quiet.

Before Feb. 27, 2024, this short stretch of road was home to four storefronts: The Angry Beaver, the Mercantile and Cafe, and Toby’s Tavern, a Noxon fixture beloved across Northwest Montana. Now only Johnson Hardware, just across Broadway Street from the other storefronts, remains.

The loss is palpable, even to someone new to town. Standing on the edge of Noxon Avenue, hearing only a dog bark and wind chimes tinkle, a sense of stillness immediately envelopes you.

I had only been in Sanders County for a few days and had no idea if Noxon was always a quiet town. Tourist season was winding down and hunting season was just peeking over the horizon. Maybe it was just shoulder season in an unincorporate town. So I asked Laura Johnson, who with her husband Kevin owns Johnson Hardware, if I was missing anything.

[LAURA JOHNSON (26:33)]: It’s definitely quieter because you don’t, you don’t have the people, I'm going to stop by the store and grab this or that. They got the trailer in, and that is, they’ve done very well with that there is a lot in there for what it is, yeah. But it is. It's quieter.

[NARRATOR]: Laura grew up in nearby Heron, her family having moved there from Seattle when she was two years old. She and Kevin met going to school together. They married in 1995 and had two sons, and in 2001 they bought the store. The boys, now in their 20s, returned to Noxon after college and work at the family store when they’re not busy with their own adventures.

[LAURA JOHNSON (28:30)]: we were the high school sweetheart thing. It’s been good, it’s good to raise the kids here. It’s a great place to be.

[NARRATOR]: The hardware store remains busy, the waves of customers coming in cycles determined by the workday and the season, Laura tells me. Contractors arrive first thing and by mid-morning business is steady. When I talked to her, the temperatures were just beginning to dip. A reminder for a lot of people that time was running short on getting their projects done before winter.

Noxon is like that, too. The regional school just down the street from the hardware store still draws people into town, Laura says.

But the absence of the three stores, particularly Toby’s, remains felt. Life goes on, sure, but when I asked Laura how much Noxon has transformed over the years she’s lived there, she said the small things might change, but not the big ones.

[LAURA JOHNSON (29:30)]: I went to high school, I went through fourth grade all the way through high school and you always had your store, you always had Toby's, it was just you always had those those business there. There have been some that have come and gone obviously, but those were kind of your stable things, those were always going to be there. they just, they were. So it was a shock. It's kind of, it was sad to see them, sad to see that happen.

[NARRATOR]: The fire that likely began in the Angry Beaver in the early morning hours of Feb. 27, 2024, was visible across the Clark Fork River when volunteer firefighters with the Noxon Rural Fire District arrived. It quickly spread to the Mercantile and Cafe and Toby’s Tavern, which were nestled closely on either side. Despite crews from Heron and Trout Creek pitching in, all three buildings were a pile of wreckage by mid-morning, when the fire was finally contained.

As bad as the blaze was, it was only the first of two hits Noxon took that year. In mid-July inspectors working over the Noxon Bridge, the more than a century old span that connects the town to Montana 200 across the river, deemed it unsafe for travel. Roadblocks went up and emergency vehicles were rerouted across the top of the Noxon Dam. For everyone else, getting in and out of town meant taking poorly maintained backroads to Heron.

But when I ask around town about the year’s setbacks, people turn back to the fire. Maybe it’s because temporary repairs allowed the bridge to open back up to traffic shortly after it closed – though its future remains very much in doubt – but it might be that the storefronts along Noxon Avenue were more than just a place to grab a drink, some sugar or a bite to eat.

[BILLY HILL (BillyHill2)]: This chain of little towns is just like any chain of little towns. Your bars or your supper clubs and your social centers. i mean if you in the outlying areas if you want to break the monotony this is where you come to shoot pool have a beer see your friends, see your friends or whatever. So they perform a service and this is the part that noxon lost, is there social center. And I’ve been waiting to see if its going to have an impact psychologically. Will they start feuding and fighting a little more. And all of this stuff could play in. So i ain’t talking too much about it, I’m just watching to see if it does have an effect.

[NARRATOR]: That’s Billy Hill. I met him while I was making phone calls ahead of my trip from Kalispell to Noxon after a colleague said I needed to I give him a ring. When I asked him how the town was doing after the fire and the bridge closure, he said I should just come down and stay a night or two at the hunting lodge on his ranch outside of Trout Creek.

Billy Hill is the quintessential Montanan, straight out of central casting. He sports a big Santa Claus-like white beard and bright blue eyes belying his seven decades on this earth, a brimmed hat fixed to his head and thick blue jeans strapped to his legs. Somehow both gregarious and soft spoken, but blunt in the way that some men in the west talk. He’s been a lot of things, a soldier, rancher, guide, candidate for sheriff and, back in his younger years, a magazine model for a line of boots. He fought the government after he killed a grizzly bear in self-defense – and won. He also punched out the Sanders County sheriff once during a bar brawl – the sheriff was out of line, he recalls – a fact that I just had to try and verify after I returned to the office. Sure enough, the Daily Inter Lake ran an article on it in [TKTKTK].

[BILLY HILL (Billy Hill Introduction)]: [Insert audio from file]

These days, Billy still works as a guide during hunting season. He hosts friends and weddings in his hunting lodge and cares for the herd of elk that roam his land. But he also likes to pop into town for meals and a night of dancing. If you tag along with him, you realize that everyone knows Billy and he knows everyone else. And most everybody gets together at one of the handful of bars and restaurants that dot the clusters of homes strung out along the highway running from Sanders County into Idaho.

[BILLY HILL (BillyHillInterview2 6:51): They are your hub. They are the hub of your community for business, recreation, romance they’re the hub. ... Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More people meet each other in bars than they do in church, I guarantee it.

Billy, like everyone I spoke to in and around Noxon late last summer, was aware of rumors that someone local with money was eyeing the vacant property on Noxon Avenue and might put up a bar where Toby’s once stood. But it was spoken only in cautious terms. No one could see the future. In the meantime, fears about the future of the town were cropping up.

When I first asked Jim Byler, chief of the Noxon Rural Fire District, how the town was doing, I got a laugh and a dry response.

[BYLER (start of firefighter audio)]: Have you been downtown? ... there wasn’t much to see.

Byler, who was one of the first to the scene of the fire back in February, feared the worst for Noxon. If it wasn’t for the school, which serves students across that part of Sanders County, there wouldn’t be much reason for the town to exist. Without the grocery store, the restaurant or the bar, people need to head to Sandpoint to stock up or go out, he says. Habits like that are hard to break.

[BYLER (1:12:45)]: I think people are just going to forget about it and say that is the new normal. There's nothing here so we're going to go somewhere else. We go to trout creek or Sandpoint.

[NARRATOR]: Samuel Overman, another firefighter with the rural district, says he can see that happening within his own home. His wife loved the Mercantile and Cafe. It was a great dinner date spot.

[OVERMAN (1:05:54)]: Well, my wife used to like to go to mercantile to eat, right. Quite often. And I'm like let's go to Noxon and she’s like, there’s nothing in Noxon for me now, I don’t want to go to Noxon. I’m sure there’s hundreds of people like that.

[NARRATOR]: What’s even more worrisome for Jim is that people have mostly stopped complaining. You used to hear someone griping about the lack of a restaurant or store. Now they’re just used to going elsewhere.

[BYLER (1:11:15)]: well you think about it, if you live around here, oh we can go get something to eat, oh lets go over to the hardware, now that’s all you have is a hardware, nothing to eat well lets go to Sandpoint then we can do it all. Now you’ve got one choice here, that’s the hardware.

[NARRATOR]: Johnson Hardware was one of the first stops Billy and I made together in the Noxon area. That's where we bumped into Doug Horner, a local builder, while he was walking the aisles. Doug wasn’t so worried about people getting used to leaving town for supplies, for a warm meal, for a night of dancing. He told me that people in that part of Montana are already used to driving.

But like a lot of people I met in Noxon, he wished that there was a local spot to get together. “One thing we’ve been missing for a long time is a cafe. That was a place the old boys would get together, he says, a place to take your family. A cafe or restaurant type deal. A store that is stocked with all these necessities.”

While Laura and Kevin Johnson were home that day their sons, Austin and Aaron, were minding the shop. Austin was listening in as Doug and Billy talked, a sly smile spreading across his face. There’s plenty to do, he says. Go to a volleyball game, he says from the counter, go to a football game.

Where do you go for a steak, where do you dance, where do you meet a girl, Billy says straight back at him.

Count the Johnson brothers among the more optimistic in the town, or maybe just stoic. When I spoke with them, they said the loss of the other businesses was a big hit to the town. Particularly Toby’s Tavern. The pair said it housed most of Noxon’s history inside its walls.

While they miss getting referrals from the other stores on Noxon Avenue, business has been normal, they said. The first few days after the fire, they used to look out the windows of the hardware store to see someone heading down to where the bar once stood before stopping and turning back.

As for the loss of a communal gathering spot, they were understanding if unperturbed. It’s a small town, Austin told me, and people were used to having those things around. They just want it to be like it was again.

But there’s nothing stopping a group of friends or a family or the community from getting together in other ways, he says.

The mood at the Hereford Bar, about four miles west on the highway from Noxon, is defiant. Owner Kim Syth bought the landmark in 2018 and reopened it several years later.

[KIM SYTH (2:39)]: We started right in March during covid and we, it boomed. As soon as we opened the door someone posted it on Facebook and we got ran over. I was ready to close and lock the door. The lady across the street came over and helped us you know deal with the crowds and it was a life saver.

[NARRATOR]: But the storied lodge caught fire in December 2020 and burnt down. Syth was undeterred. They began rebuilding, a big two-story log building, and opened the doors again before they even had a running toilet installed. In those early days, she told me, customers used a portable toilet. They hung tarps to keep the heat in. No one complained, she says.

[SYTH (10:47)]: We opened it up in december of 2021, the day we would lose our liquor license. We had a year to get it open or we would have lost our liquor license, so it was that day. And we opened with no bathrooms, it was a porta potty outside. It was horrible in the dead of winter.

[BILLY]: You gotta do what you gotta do.

[SYTH]: You do, yes.

[NARRATOR]: Kim and her family, all of her adult children take turns helping managing the joint, began adding back amenities a little a time. But in January 2024, about a month before the fire that claimed Noxon’s business district, tragedy struck again. There not sure how it started, but a second fire in the Hereford Bar burned it to the ground. Like the first, a cause was never found.

Despite the obstacles, her insurance dropped her the day before the second fire, for example, Kim won’t give up. These days, she operates the Hereford Bar out of a secondary building on the property, a gambrel-roofed building with a dirt parking lot facing the highway. It was a bar at some point prior in its history, which made the conversion easier. Before the fire, it was mostly used to house fireworks.

[SYTH (21:04)]: I won’t let it go. I’m already in the process to rebuild. I just got to deal with a couple of problems. That’s right. I’m rebuilding. The Hereford is still here. This isn’t where I want to be but it’s working.

[BILLY]: it’s going to thrive.

[SYTH]: It will, I know it will. I know it will.

[BILLY]: And it sounds like you’re full of optimism.

[SYTH]: I have to be. I’m coming back one way or another.

[NARRATOR]:So when Kim heard about the fire in Noxon, particularly the loss of Toby’s Tavern, her heart broke a little. It was a community museum as much as anything else, she says, and she knew that for its present owner, Toby’s daughter Gayle, it was like losing her father all over again.

[SYTH (29:37)]: The devastation is huge. You put everything into something and lose it like that, it’s unreal. And this is the first time I’ve ever been around fire was here.

[NARRATOR]: Like a lot of people around Noxon, Kim is worried about the community’s future. It’s already picked up a nickname, she says, “Tombstone.” The loss of Noxon’s businesses combined with the failure of the bridge in and out of town has dampened spirits around the town.

[SYTH (34:14)]: Oh the bridge. I think everybody, there’s a lot of depression here. I think it’s hurt the morale here. I think it really has. When the bridge went down that was very, like another catastrophic thing for everybody. Hopefully it's going to be an easy fix but when they shut it down it was a big deal.

[NARRATOR]: But she’s not giving up despite the fires. Although there remain financial hurdles ahead, Syth plans on rebuilding. Noxon isn’t down for the count either, she says.

[SYTH (29:37)]: and everybody is calling Noxon now Tombstone. Because they don’t think that we can come back. There’s a lot of, you know, it's like no we’re coming back.

[NARRATOR]: Back in Noxon, I get a chance to meet Kevin Johnson at the hardware store on my last morning in town. When I first popped in and met his sons, they warned me he likely wasn’t coming in that day and probably wouldn’t shoot over on my account. When I asked if that was because of a scheduling conflict or becuase he didn’t want to speak with the press about the fire, they laughed. He’s the unofficial town mayor, they said, and he knows it. Some days he likes it, other days not so much.

[KEVIN JOHNSON (39:32)]: Yes. Unelected town mayor. Yeah. Unelected. And that’s the way it’s going to remain.

(39:53) So we’ve been in the community for years, decades. You know, I don’t mind being the unelected mayor, I don’t mind being in the spotlight. I was on the school board for a long time so that’s where the press also was. But I was on the school board for a long time, 9 years, I was the chairman of the board for six of those if I'm not mistaken. So people people know me. I’m a familiar face. So a lot of times people do, ask Kevin, what do you think? Sometimes I’ll tell them.

[NARRATOR]: Like his sons’ Kevin has seen the hole the fire left in the community manifest itself. During the summer months confused visitors circled the town before heading back out to the highway, he says.

[KEVIN JOHNSON (10:28)]: Even today it's still different. You got a quiet feel to town. School is going now so you have traffic back flowing through town, but it is quiet. I was telling the bar owner the other day, I said yeah we still see motorcycle groups coming in, coming through in summertime, they’re coming off the highway, and you can hear them coming down. They come down, they circle turn around and go back out and I know exactly what they were doing. They were coming out to stop at the bar, have a beer, burger and go. We’ve only had a couple of them pull in here, that have said hey, we’ve been on this ride before and where is that restaurant at, where’s that bar at. There have been people who have stopped in wondering and they just, unless you know, they didn’t remember it there but once you point it out to them it’s pretty tough, so yeah.

[NARRATOR]: But as far as what the future might hold for Noxon and its three vacant lots, I’m not on the list of people Kevin is willing to speculate with. It’s private property, he tells me, and those property owners can do with it what they like. What makes sense for them.

He understands though that the questions are coming from a place of concern. And what he might want to see go up in place of the Angry Beaver, the Mercantile and Cafe, and Toby’s Tavern doesn’t really matter all that much.

[KEVIN JOHNSON (40:39)]: If I had a quarter for every time somebody said what do you think is going to happen with the town I probably could have rebuilt the store twice. Because a lot of people, people care. That's why they do that. But there has been, what do you think Kevin and really what I think about what’s going to happen down here doesn’t matter because it’s someone else’s property so. But no, it’s always going to happen. So as long as we’re in the business, people are always going to ask us, if it wears on us, that’s OK, we only have to do this for 20 more years.

I did ask him though if he was worried at all for his business. After all, several of the people I spoke to were concerned that those who live in and around Noxon might get used to running to Sandpoint for their goods. They might stop dropping by the local hardware store if they need to cross into Idaho anyway. Kevin waved that away.

[KEVIN JOHNSON (41:49)]: No. Zero concern about that. If the bridge closed, that might change things but as far as things are right now, it’s really regular, it’s business as normal for all of our customers. It’s the vendor side that’s different for us. Because customers aren’t leaving town with 28k worth of freight that they need to cross the bridge with, it’s vendors that are coming into town with possibly an abundant amount of freight that we have to make arrangements for to come into town. But as far as the customers we’ve got a very loyal customer base. They know us well. Often times they don’t want to drive to Sandpoint, they don’t want to drive to wherever it might be to get their products. So I have no concerns bout that. It’s just a matter of keeping that bridge open to the public so that we can get our kids to school and get supplies for the entire town. Hopefully a grocery store, a bar and a restaurant someday.