Marysville’s Methodist Episcopal Church was built in 1886 by its congregation on land purchased from Thomas Cruse, who founded the town in 1876 around his Drum Lummon gold and silver claims. Its modest clapboard-sided frame and bell tower rose during a period of rapid growth after the Northern Pacific Railroad reached Marysville earlier that year and brought a steady supply of machine-milled building materials, as crude cabins of rough-hewn lumber quickly gave way to more modern buildings. By the 1890s, the population had reached 5,000, and Cruse’s mine, sold to English capitalists in 1882, was on its way to producing twenty million dollars in silver and gold. Abandoned in 1939, the church neared collapse before John W. and Margaret C. Hollow of Helena bought it in 1967 and began restoring the building and many of its furnishings to their original simple grace. John W. Hollow, whose grandparents John E. O’Brien and Ellen O’Grady were married in Marysville in 1887, painstakingly reconstructed the windows in their original frames, and today the church’s stark silhouette remains a favorite of painters and photographers.