By Catharine Melin-Moser
As legend tells it, in 1912, Grandma Cresap answered a knock at the door of her daughter’s house on Main Street in Lewistown. The group of men standing on the stoop introduced themselves as federal Coast and Geodetic surveyors before they relayed exciting news. They had pinpointed the geographical center of Montana — right under the Akins kitchen sink!
In 1927, Mr. and Mrs. Atkins gave the house to their daughter, Bohnda, and her husband, Ray Dockery, Sr. By now, the story had been told and retold countless times. The late Lewistown historian John Foster recalled watching his mother wash dishes at their kitchen sink when she told him, “If you look down the drain of Mrs. Dockery’s sink, you can see the exact center of Montana.”
Around 1959, the Dockery house passed to Ray Dockery, Jr. who hung a copper plaque above the sink stating something like, “Here is the Center of Montana.” Things stayed this way until 1974 when the First Christian Church congregation bought the Dockery house and turned it into a parsonage. So, townsfolk and city fathers now proudly pointed at the parsonage when informing visitors and important people that Montana’s center was under the kitchen sink.
Then came the wild day in February 1982. Expansion of the Yogo Inn into a convention center was underway. Chunks of earth were no sooner turned over when a workman’s pickaxe struck a small boulder. Instead of the expected sound of “thud,” the strike made a tinny sound. The axe had struck a beat-up gold miner’s pan set atop of the boulder! That was intriguing, and so was the crude outline of Montana chiseled into the stoneface, and with an X carved in the center. A buffalo horn lying next to the rock was the next discovery. The horn was hollow and used as a time capsule. It revealed a surveyor’s compass, a coin, and a note dated February 12, 1912. According to the note, “Good Friend Forbear To Disturb the Stone entombed in here. Blessed are they Who accept
the Center Mark And to Hell with those Who would move this Rock.” The writer had signed it “W.S.”
This set off a firestorm — Who was W.S.? Did old-timers remember such a person? How accurate was the center mark? The old-timers pondered. The initials might be those of Will Stafford. He had surveyed the Jawbone Railroad, reaching Lewistown in 1903. The Yogo Inn people and Lewistown city fathers rallied around W.S. “What an incredible discovery!” they said and immediately adopted his center mark.
The old-timers weren’t fooled. The bruhaha had been staged, they said, and poorly so. They stuck by the Dockery kitchen sink.
By 1987, First Christian Church elders, for reasons unclear, decided that the center of Montana was not under the parsonage after all. They scuttled the sink as well as Ray Dockery’s copper plaque. Then they razed the parsonage.
The twenty-first century arrived. A new generation of geographers with devices that crunched numbers roved around Lewistown. By 2006, they had lots of numbers and unpopular news. The center mark wasn’t on First Christian Church ground. Nor was it on Yogo Inn ground. It had shifted once more, this time traveling nine miles west of Lewistown to an ordinary pasture. Today, cattle graze around the small pile of rocks marking Montana’s geographical center.