Keeping history on track

New museum manager returns to his railroad roots in Whitefish

By RICHARD HANNERS / Whitefish Pilot

It was natural that after a career in information technology and telecommunications in the Seattle area that Whitefish native Kevin McCready would return to his roots. The new manager for the Stumptown Historical Society's depot museum grew up around trains and still feels close to them.

The son of a Great Northern Railroad brakeman and conductor, McCready remembers riding with his father in a locomotive or caboose as a child.

"I got to blow the horn, turn the headlight on and off, put my hand on the throttle," he said.

He recalls getting to know the workers at the train depot and in his neighborhood and the downtown parades during Gala Days and Railroad Appreciation Day.

"I carried a picket sign once for a couple minutes when I was about five," he said.

McCready moved back to the Flathead eight years ago and then to Whitefish last summer, about the time he began volunteering at the museum.

He took over the museum manager position from Flossie Fletcher in June. Fletcher, an active member of the Dirty Hands Gardening Club, ran the museum after Frank Gregg died, McCready said.

McCready's father, Lewis, was born in Ronan. After a stint in the Army, he came to the Flathead looking for a job at the new Anaconda Alum-inum Co. smelter. Instead, he hired on with Great Northern. Forty years later, he retired.

"He started out on the extra board, riding eastbound and westbound trains," McCready said. "Later, with seniority, he mostly rode westbound trains."

McCready said Great Northern would sometimes send hundreds of men with shovels to clear snow from tracks. His father was never hit by an avalanche, but his train was once trapped by a mudslide near Red Eagle, one of several small depots between Columbia Falls and Marias Pass. And when the 1964 Flood wiped out the mainline through the Canyon, his father was stuck on the east side of the Divide for a month.

A lot has changed since the early 1950s. Locomotives are more powerful now, cars are bigger and trains are much longer. The cabooses are gone, and a lot more technology is in place. Central dispatch for BNSF Railway today, for example, is in Fort Worth, Texas.

"Trains in the old days had six or seven crew members," McCready said. "An engineer, fireman and conductor and maybe four or five brakemen."

The days of steam began with wood-burning boilers. Later, coal was brought down from the Crowsnest mines near Fernie, B.C. Great Northern spur lines connected grain silos, lumber mills and other facilities around the state to the main tracks along the Hi-Line.

Passenger trains were also important to Great Northern, which promoted Glacier National Park and built some of the Park's grand hotels early in the 20th century. The Great Northern was not a land-grant railroad and needed to develop the surrounding countryside to make the route profitable.

"Great Northern founder James Hill and his son Louis were not speculators," McCready said. "They took the time to do it right, with efficient low-grade hills. They didn't just want to make money — they wanted to build a transcontinental railroad."

McCready said the merger of the Great Northern, Northern Pacific and more recently Santa Fe railroad companies fulfilled James Hill's dream, and he notes that BNSF Railway's main route is the one James Hill built.

It was while browsing the Internet that McCready learned about the Great Northern Railway Historical Society, and his interest in railroad history took off. He spent several weeks in the Pilot office two years ago poring over old issues.

Recently, he rescued hundreds of bound-volumes of old newspapers at the former Flathead County Museum that were headed to the dump. He has been indexing and archiving the newspapers at The Museum at Central School, in Kalispell, and expects the project will take another five years to complete.

McCready said he'd like to help the historical society move into the 21st century with new technology, but he also wants to focus on the fundamentals — including oral histories.

"We've been falling off on getting them done," he said.

He has a digital voice recorder and dictation software that he says can help get oral-history transcripts done more easily, but he'd also like to see more video used. A pamphlet from the Montana State Historical Society describing the best format for conducting oral histories will also be implemented.

A better database that indexes the historical society's photographs and artifacts would also enable the museum to rotate more items on display, he said.

The museum's retail offerings have been expanded, thanks in part to McCready's connections with vendors for hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, postcards and even computer-screen savers on disc.

The museum is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. in summer and Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. in winter. McCready said he's kept the museum open at night at least eight times this year so Amtrak passengers could visit.

For more information on railroad history, visit the Great Northern Railway Historical Society's Web site at www.gnrhs.org. McCready's personal railroad history Web site can be found at www.trainweb.org/gnry.