By Catharine Melin-Moser
Situated in the Little Snowy Mountains, the town of Forest Grove once bustled feverishly during the central Montana homesteading boom of 1910-1919. Decades passed, prosperity slowed, and people moved away. A few modern homes exist in Forest Grove today. You’ll also find a post office not much bigger than a postage stamp, decaying homesteads with assemblages of idle machinery that hasn’t rumbled in decades, a weathered and vacant early 19th century schoolhouse, and completing the picture of this tiny ranching community is the pretty white church.
In 1907, Episcopalian Bishop Richmond Brewer had dreams of building a proper place to worship. He was certain he could persuade homesteaders, cowhands, sheepherders, and merchants to donate money to build a church in sparsely settled Forest Grove. Donors came forward to prove him right. A list of their names and amounts, from 50 cents to $500, was sealed inside a tin box and placed in the cornerstone. Clean and simple architecture reflected the no-nonsense, Spartan lifestyle by which homesteaders lived. On a summer day in 1908, during a community picnic, Forest Grove townfolk dedicated their new St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
Inside the snug sanctuary, natural light illuminates stained-glass windows that cast red, yellow, and green hues across walls painted white. A pot-bellied stove warms congregants, usually about twenty or so, on chilly Sunday mornings. Plumbing and electricity in the building are nonexistent because the congregants like it that way. Except for a new roof and siding, the historic church has changed little.
A mere four years later, a representative for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad came to town. The good news was that steel rails were coming to Forest Grove and would link to Grass Range, sixteen miles east, and Lewistown, twenty miles west. His not so good news was that the church and the adjoining cemetery sat smack dab on the right-of-way. The predicament was settled easily in 1913 when railroad workers moved the church and graves to a nearby plot of donated land.
The church was founded on the Episcopalian faith, but one church warden expressed an overriding sentiment when penning his historical account of the church in 1928. John Sellers wrote, “It is ‘God’s Acre.’ We don’t expect to be asked what denomination we belong to when we present ourselves above. Neither will there be anyone asked that question when they come here to lay away their dead.”
A new chapter opened in 1969.
That’s when the Episcopal Diocese in Helena announced plans to demolish the church. To prevent such a terrible fate, each of the four church officers, donated $1 to purchase the building and preserve it. The congregants renamed their church, the Forest Grove Church, and stipulating their house of worship be nondenominational. “We have families who are Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, and so on,” said the late Reverend David Iverson, who preached there for fifty-four years. “Our hearts are open to everyone.”
Forest Grove Church services are held Easter Sunday and every first and third Sunday at 9am through the end of September. This isolated community between Lewistown and Grass Range is accessed by gravel roads running south of Highway 200.