Polebridge Mercantile

Bill Adair opened his first store across the river in Sullivan Meadow in 1904. After the land east of the North Fork became Glacier National Park in 1910, he moved to this side, and in 1914 he finished a two-story false-front store here. He hand-hewed its log walls with a broadax so they would take wallpaper, and planted the only elm in the North Fork, which still shades the saloon next door.

It was Adair's store then. Polebridge was a rival: Ben Hensen's store and post office half a mile north, opened in the 1920s because Hensen thought Adair charged too much. When Hensen won the post office contract his wife May submitted the name, after the log bridge homesteaders had built across the river. The Hensens closed in the Depression, the post office moved to Adair's, and it stayed until 2001. On September 7, 1988, the Red Bench Fire swept through the community and burned some two dozen homes and Adair's barn; the store came through.

There is still no electricity or cell service. The power lines stop about twenty miles down the North Fork Road, which is gravel, washboarded and slow for the thirty-five miles from Columbia Falls; the bakery case is the reward. Beyond the store the road crosses into Glacier toward Bowman and Kintla lakes.