Old Fort Benton

Logs were floated downstream from Fort Lewis in May 1847 and erected on foundations built the year before. The fort was called Fort Lewis or Fort Clay before it was officially named for Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri upon completion of the Bourgeois Quarters in adobe on Christmas Day 1850. Its log buildings were replaced by adobe, and the trade store was the last to be rebuilt in 1860. By 1865 the fur trade was over, and Chouteau and Company sold its holdings to the Northwestern Trading Company. Buildings at the fort deteriorated rapidly, and when the military took over in 1869, the walls and buildings were in such disrepair that troops were quartered downtown. The army abandoned the fort in 1881 at the end of the Indian Wars. By the turn of the century, only two walls and one blockhouse remained. A major restoration effort by the Daughters of the American Revolution saved the blockhouse, and today it is the oldest standing building in Montana. In its heyday Fort Benton was the premier Blackfoot buffalo robe trading post on the Upper Missouri and is the only original post still in Montana.

Fort Benton, Montana · United States