Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site

Johnny Grant built the house in 1862, two storeys of hewed logs on the east bank of the river now called the Clark Fork. Grant, born at Fort Edmonton in 1831, had made his start on the emigrant trails, trading for cattle worn out by the crossing, fattening them on Deer Lodge Valley grass and selling them on, and he lived here with his large Métis family. In 1865 Conrad Kohrs offered to buy him out and was refused. A year later Grant wanted his children somewhere less raw, and in August 1866 he sold the place for $19,200, about 350 head of cattle included, and took his family north to Manitoba with a party of Métis.

Kohrs, born in Holstein in 1835, had come to the gold camps as a butcher and needed pasture. With his half-brother John Bielenberg he made the home ranch the base of a cattle operation that ran across Montana's open range, and he sat in both the territorial and state legislatures and led the Montana Stockgrowers Association. His wife, Augusta, gave the log house a brick addition and filled it with Victorian furniture. By 1919 the outside ranges had been sold off and the business was down to the home ranch, and Kohrs died in 1920.

His grandson Conrad Kohrs Warren managed the place and bought it with his wife, Nell, in 1940, and they kept nearly everything: the furniture, the wagons and tack, dozens of outbuildings and the ranch's business records back to 1866. It was made a National Historic Landmark in 1960 and authorized as a national historic site on August 25, 1972, and the Park Service still runs it as a working cattle ranch, at the north edge of Deer Lodge just off I-90.