Historic St. Mary's Mission

The Bitterroot Salish had asked for the Black Robes to come, and in September 1841 Father Pierre-Jean De Smet and a small party of Jesuits came up the valley and founded St. Mary's Mission among them. Father Antonio Ravalli, an Italian Jesuit trained as a physician as well as a priest, joined them in the 1840s. The mission farmed, built Montana's first mills and kept a school, but Blackfeet raids wore it down, and in 1850 the Jesuits closed it and sold the buildings to the trader John Owen.

In 1866 the church sent Ravalli back to reopen it, half a mile south of the first site. He found the old mission in ruins and built anew, and the chapel and the small log building where he lived and kept his pharmacy, the first in Montana, are the ones that stand here now. The mission closed in 1891, the same year the last of the Bitterroot Salish were forced north to the Flathead Reservation; the local congregation went on using the chapel until 1951.

The chapel, Ravalli's house and pharmacy, and a museum make up the grounds, on the west edge of Stevensville. The town claims to be the oldest continuous settlement of newcomers in Montana; the Salish had lived in this valley for thousands of years before any of them arrived.