Moss Mansion

Preston Boyd Moss came to Billings from Paris, Missouri, in 1892 and within a few years had a hand in most of what made the town run: the First National Bank, the Billings Gazette, the light, water and power company, and later the Northern Hotel. In 1903 he built a house for his family on Division Street at the west edge of downtown, and for it he hired Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, the New York architect of the original Waldorf-Astoria and the Plaza. It is red sandstone, three storeys and twenty-five rooms, with a Moorish arch at the entrance, and it cost $105,000.

Moss and his wife, Mattie, raised six children there. The rest married and made homes of their own; Melville never married, and she stayed on after her parents were gone and lived in the house until her own death in 1984, at eighty-eight. She changed it very little, and that is why it survives the way it does: the original furniture, draperies, carpets and light fixtures are still in the rooms, along with the family's letters, the children's games, and boxes of Christmas ornaments found in storage that now go back on the tree each December.

After her death the Billings Preservation Society bought the house in 1986, and the state and city took title in 1988 with the society running it as a museum. Tours take about an hour. Filmmakers have borrowed its rooms for period interiors, Son of the Morning Star and Return to Lonesome Dove among them.