Stoltze history spans more than a century

An eye to the future

While the F.H. Stoltze Land Company officially incorporated on Aug. 31, 1912, its history in Montana is more than a century old, dating back to the 1890s, when the Minnesota entrepreneur F.H. Stoltze first came to the Flathead.

Born in Wisconsin in 1859, F.H. Stoltze had a varied business career, beginning with hardware sales in St. Paul and even branching into the buffalo bones industry, as the vast herds were eliminated from the Great Plains.

“He was a self-made man,” said Ron Buentemeier, the company’s unofficial historian.

After meeting railroad tycoon James Hill, Stoltze put up general stores and built towns for Hill as the Great Northern Railroad ran west across North Dakota. He eventually ended up in Northwest Montana, where he held an interest in the Empire Lumber Co. mill, which supplied lumber to Great Northern as the railroad ran past Kila, west of Kalispell.

“Half Moon was the last town he established for Great Northern,” Buentemeier said, referring to the small community midway between Columbia Falls and Whitefish.

On June 26, 1909, Stoltze joined with Edward Konantz and William Kiley to form the Enterprise Lumber Co. They rebuilt the mill on Smith Lake, west of Kalispell, and provided ties, timbers and dimensional lumber to the railroad. The company owned land or held timber leases in areas now called Emmons Creek and Coon Hallow. Logs were brought down by wagon in the summer and by sleigh in winter.

Stoltze was also involved in the Empire lumber company, which was incorporated in 1910. A mill was built at the junction of Truman and Emmons creeks, where an old mill pond and cookhouse still stand. Logs were brought down to the mill by flumes or a narrow gauge railroad.

Stoltze also had interests in the State Lumber Co., which incorporated in Montana in December 1898 and at one time operated a mill on the Flathead River downstream from the present Montana Veterans Home. By 1904, State Lumber owned timberlands around Whitefish, and by 1906, it operated a mill on the Whitefish River near Hodgson Road.

Logs were brought to the Whitefish River mill by floating them across Whitefish Lake and down the river. The mill shut down in May 1918, and the buildings were moved by horse to the Half Moon site over the next two winters.

Andrew Westberg ran a small mill on leased land at Half Moon from 1902 to 1917. A lease agreement for a mill site at Half Moon was negotiated with John and Olive Lewis. State Lumber acquired the Half Moon site in September 1917.

State Lumber built a new bunkhouse, cookhouse and store at Half Moon, and at one time, 32 company-owned homes stood near the mill. Construction of the mill took about five years, with the first timber sawn in May 1923. F.W. Horstkotte was awarded the $225,000 contract to build the mill in January 1920. It featured a single band and a gang saw with a capacity of 100,000 board-feet in one 8-hour shift.

Westberg’s mill pond was doubled in size, and his narrow gauge track was replaced with standard track for a 32-ton Shay locomotive. State Lumber acquired the locomotive, eight log cars and enough steel for seven miles of track from the Eureka Lumber Co. Track was run into the Trumbull Creek drainage to access 10,000 acres of timberland, where five logging camps were established.

F.H. Stoltze’s health began to fail in the mid-1920s and his son, John R. Stoltze, returned from Shreveport, La., to take over the family lumber business. A 1917 Princeton University graduate with a degree in geology, John R. Stoltze had spent much of his life in boarding schools after his mother died when he was eight.

After serving as a second lieutenant in World War I, John R. Stoltze moved to Louisiana, where he was successful in the oil industry. The diversified Stoltze family business at one time included land, lumber, freeze-dried dairy products and oil. The family sold its Louisiana oil interests about 20 years ago.

F.H. Stoltze, who had been active in St. Paul society life and owned a fine home on Pillsbury Avenue, died on May 21, 1928. Dan O’Brien, who married F.H. Stoltze’s granddaughter Sally, helped revise the company’s board of directors in the late 1990s to include one family member from each generation and two non-family members. O’Brien is the current board chairman.

The company faced a crisis in August 1929 when a fire that started a quarter mile away from Stoltze crews working near Trumbull Creek raced out of control.

The Half Moon Fire burned more than 100,000 acres as it went up and over Teakettle Mountain and burned through the Middle Fork Canyon all the way to Apgar, in Glacier National Park, taking out vast stands of cedar trees along the way.

Both the Forest Service and the National Park Service put a lot of work into computing damages, and blame focused on Stoltze’s Shay locomotive, even though an investigation could not prove how the fire started.

To protect the family’s interests, John R. Stoltze foreclosed on State Lumber Co. The assets were sold at a sheriff’s auction on Nov. 18, 1934, and were transferred to the current company, F.H. Stoltze Land & Lumber Co., on Aug. 1, 1934. John R. Stoltze died on Jan. 16, 1991.