Stories from the Museum: Building a Story from Newspapers and Directories

Part of studying history is learning to examine primary sources and piece together a story from scattered tidbits of information. The broader a subject matter is, or the more popular, the more likely it is that someone has already pieced together a lot of the information from the various plays, journals, and public records from the time. An exciting part of working in a local museum environment has been the opportunity to put a lot of those pieces together for myself. This chance was put before me just recently when writing an article for a local publication, when one piece of the research I was doing spiraled into a rabbit hole that built up an entirely separate story from what the article’s topic was.

The exciting thing about this particular tale is that the primary sources I pieced together were not the ones that we tended to work from in college classes. While newspapers are standard, it has been exciting in my own genealogy research to use more official forms—where all that is listed is raw data—and to extrapolate stories from there. This time, I was looking into a specific location in downtown Kalispell and its history. Unfortunately, the only story I had been able to find covered only the current and previous proprietors. I knew, roughly, who the owner of the property before that was, but initially, I had no name. That was when, in my effort to glean as much basic information about the establishment as possible, I started to look through the collection of Kalispell directories housed in the museum.

Save a few gaps in years, we had enough years of records that I could locate the business address a couple years after it transferred to the earliest owner I knew and was able to backtrack from there. I found the first owner of the location. With assistance from an individual who is currently helping on a large museum project, I was able to find a few articles about the first owner and found out that the building had originally been constructed as a barber shop. We even managed to find the announcement in the Daily Inter Lake as well as an advertisement for this business.

After finding this information, I went back to the directories and reviewed—in-depth—the story of the building and its transformation into its current business. I was even able to piece together that the building location consists of three separate addresses, one of which no longer exists. The owner operated the barber shop for a few years before opening a saloon in the next-door address, and even operated the two in tangent for a time before focusing solely on the bar. A separate barber shop operated out of the old barber shop location for a year before moving locations and the bar-owner decided to use both addresses to operate the saloon. One address was the office and the other would be the bar.

In college courses, it isn’t as exciting, I suppose, to review data sheets in classes to help teach historical research. These records are just as vital—if not more so—than speeches and newspaper articles. While they do not tell all the little details and stories about what a day in the life of that bar owner was like, documents like directories and census data are intrinsic to piecing together a timeline of businesses and local landscape of peoples’ lives. It is exciting, too, as a historian, to deal with pure information as opposed to shifting through literary analysis and separating out opinion from the facts of a historic event as portrayed in many newspapers. These basic building blocks give us the framework around which to fill in later details and personal tales that we find later and also help us to sift out the facts from opinion in the aforementioned newspapers and literature.

Working on this article was an exciting undertaking. I found an incredible quantity of information on multiple aspects of the topic I was writing on, a great majority of which was greatly condensed into the final product. That is the job of a historian, though, learning all the details and exciting stories that spark interest and surprise you—especially when rabbit trails turn into their own tales that you would never have expected. Then you have to turn it into a final written piece with a lot of the information you gleaned omitted, either simply because it strays too far from the main point of the article or otherwise because it would simply make the end result too verbose. Hence, I suppose, my sharing of this story here in my Stories from the Museum section, a place I intend to use to give anecdotes of fun information I find in my job or in touring other museums on very specific subjects or artifacts that find no place elsewhere. I do hope that I can share this in a way that everyone gets to enjoy.