In 1936, the Department of Transportation launched an ambitious program to promote Montana's scenic, recreational, and historical treasures. Conceived by department engineer Bob Fletcher, it included landscaped picnic areas, roadside museums, highway maps, and a network of ports-of-entry stations on the state's main border highways. These stations were rustic log cabins staffed during the summer by courteous college students dressed in blue jeans, western-style shirts, cowboy boots, and bandannas, who answered questions and gave out road maps and tabloid histories of the state to out-of-state visitors. The department built this station in 1936 along old US Highway 91 in Lima, where for two decades thousands of visitors stopped to learn about Montana and receive a friendly welcome to Big Sky Country. The stations remained an important part of Montana's tourist industry until the department phased them out in the 1950s.