Pioneering Southern Methodist minister Learner Blackman Stateler preached his first sermon in Willow Creek on Christmas Day 1864 in a cabin built by a local farmer. Like many of the area’s early residents, he was a Southern sympathizer from Missouri whose family fled Civil War violence by moving west. In Willow Creek he found a welcoming congregation and organized Montana Territory’s first Methodist Episcopal Church, South. In 1873 the congregation built a wood-frame chapel a mile from the present-day church location. In 1908 a town site company associated with the Milwaukee railroad platted the new town of Willow Creek, and by 1910 two railroads served the community, which soon had three general stores, a bank, a blacksmith shop, and two grain elevators. In 1913 congregants decided to move their church to the center of the growing town, and members of the Ladies Aid raised much of the money needed for a new building named for Stateler. Completed in 1915, the church combined old and new in its design, with Gothic-arched windows and a Norman tower alongside open eaves, exposed rafter tails, and concrete block construction. Supplied readily by the Trident Cement Company in nearby Three Forks, concrete block came into widespread use between 1905 and 1930 as a durable, affordable, and attractive substitute for stone.