Finnish immigrant Ephraim Kent settled in Red Lodge in the early 1900s to work in the coal mines while his wife, Fiina, began a small dairy business. It was a family venture from the start, with all the children helping deliver raw milk in buckets and later bottles to local customers. The business grew, and by 1938 the Kent sons and their wives were all involved in the dairy. When a city ordinance prohibited cows in town, the family moved, purchasing land and an abandoned building in Bear Creek. They carefully salvaged its bricks, wood joists, and decorative tin ceiling to build their round barn. Eighty-one-year-old Emery McNamee, an expert on round barns, served as building consultant, but Ephraim and his sons did the work. Although none of the Kents had ever laid brick, they quickly learned and adapted materials at hand, using steam pipes from a nearby mine as stall dividers, finishing hand-hewn beams with a plane whose cutting bit was made from a car leaf spring, and shaping thirty-seven log support posts with a draw knife. Built with the determination, perseverance, and fortitude the Finnish call “sisu,” the round barn served the Kent family for thirty years. Many local people remember summer dances on its spacious second floor before it was filled with winter feed. When Armas and Sylvia Kent retired in 1969, the barn was converted into a restaurant, while its historic function remained evident as an example of adaptive reuse.