Fort Peck Theatre

The Army Corps of Engineers built Fort Peck as a government town for the dam, and in 1934 it put this theater in the middle of it as a temporary building, finished in less than nine months for close to $90,000. It opened on November 16, 1934, with The Richest Girl in the World. While the dam was building it ran around the clock, seven days a week, and the 1,200 seats went for forty cents on the floor and thirty in the balcony to lines that could stretch seven blocks.

The style is a Swiss chalet set down on the plains: herringbone siding, jigsawed trim, cut-out balustrades and false balconies outside, open wooden trusses inside, and light fixtures made by hand in the Corps' own shops from metal strapping and blown glass. A weather vane drawn into the architect's original plans still sits on the peak of the roof. The town's hotel and a row of houses from the same year carry the same chalet manner, and the nomination that put the theater on the National Register in 1983 called the group the most architecturally consistent set of chalet-style rustic buildings of its kind.

The theater outlived the job it was built for and kept showing films until 1968; its carbon-arc projectors survive in working order. It is a summer stage now: the Fort Peck Fine Arts Council runs a season of professional summer stock in it each year.