Twenty-Eight Mile Station

Alma Coffin rode this road in August 1878, one of three sisters from Mankato, Minnesota, who had come up the Missouri by steamboat to join their father, a mine superintendent at Glendale. Her reminiscence, written from a diary about 1910, records a coach that allowed each passenger twenty-five pounds of baggage, trunks sent on by ox-freight, and passengers climbing down to pry the wheels out of Sun River mud while the driver told the women to stay seated. The coach reached Helena's Grand Hotel four hours early, after thirty-two hours without rest.

What the plaque says

Twenty-Eight Mile Station Lieutenant John Mullan built a wagon road through this area in late July 1860. The 624-mile road connected the head of navigation on the Columbia River at Walla Walla, Washington Territory and Fort Benton, the world's innermost steamboat port on the upper Missouri River. With the discovery of gold in southwestern Montana in the early 1860s, the road became an important freight and passenger route between Fort Benton and the mining camps. In 1866, Charles C. Huntley established a stage line between Fort Benton and Helena. One of the stage stations was located near here and called Twenty-Eight Mile Station because it was that distance from Fort Benton. For the next twenty-one years, the station was an important stop on the Benton Road. For a while in the 1870s, the imposing two-story station was famous for the high quality of meals served there and the hospitality of its operator, Irish emigrant Edward Kelly. A decade later, however, the meals were much less appetizing, as one passenger recalled, "No excuse should condone for such nauseous 'provender.' With a feeling of disgust we bolted on to Bull's Head...." When the Montana Central Railroad was completed in 1887, the old stage line was abandoned and the station closed.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Giant Springs State Park — 2.9 mi
  The spring William Clark called the largest he ever saw, and the 201-foot river a fifth-grade class got into the record books.
• C. M. Russell Museum — 4.3 mi
  The cowboy artist's house and log studio, and the story of Nancy Russell, who turned his bar-tab paintings into a career.

More markers nearby

• Black Eagle — 3.4 mi
• Lewis & Clark Portage Route — 5.4 mi
• Malmstrom Air Force Base — 5.4 mi
• Coal Mines and Railroads — 10 mi