Havre began in 1891 as a Great Northern railroad town, and by 1904 its business blocks along First Street were wood, packed shoulder to shoulder. On the morning of January 14, 1904, fire broke out at the back of Gross and Lebert's store, reached a stock of gunpowder and blew out the windows and the roof. Hoses run off the Great Northern's water system soaked the north side of the street, and the town thought it had won. Around noon a second fire started, took the Havre Hotel, sixty rooms built in 1901, and burned to the end of the block. The Great Falls Tribune reported Havre almost wiped out. Nobody ever settled what started it.
A city ordinance passed a few months earlier required new buildings in the business district to be brick or stone, so Havre came back in masonry, and the downtown that stands today is largely that rebuilding. While it went up, every building left standing held two businesses or more. The tour's story is that some merchants went below the sidewalks into connected basements, and that once they moved back upstairs the space went to the trades Havre was notorious for: saloons, opium smoking, prostitution, and later Prohibition liquor. Shorty Young, whose Mint Saloon had stood on the corner before the fire, gets an office of his own down there, with a shotgun within reach.
Local boosters dug out and restored the passages and opened them as Havre Beneath the Streets in 1994. It is a re-creation, furnished with antiques and mannequins: a bank, a drugstore with a soda fountain, a butcher's counter, a bakery, the Sporting Eagle Saloon, the Wah Sing Laundry, an opium den and a bordello. Tours leave from 120 Third Avenue and are booked ahead.
The closest stops worth working into your route