“In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing. We lived at the juncture of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others. He told us about Christ’s disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman.”--Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It

Missoula architect A. J. Gibson, a member of the First Presbyterian congregation, came out of retirement to design this large Gothic Revival-style church in 1915, in the historic Southside neighborhood. Prominent features of the church include a square bell tower, steep central gable, stained-glass windows, and pointed-arch windows. The original Presbyterian Church stood at the southeast corner of today’s Pine and Ryman streets, but by the early 1900s, the congregation had outgrown the small church. Church leaders purchased lots on the south side of the river at South Fifth and Myrtle streets, and construction of the new church started soon thereafter.

Dr. John Norman Maclean, father of noted author Norman Maclean, was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church from 1909 to 1925. Born in about 1869 in Nova Scotia, Reverend Maclean first came to Montana in 1897 to serve as pastor at the Presbyterian Church in Bozeman, which he did for five years. He was then called to Iowa for a time, until the reverend and his family moved to Missoula in 1909. Reverend Maclean’s sons, Norman and Paul, grew up in Missoula and learned to fly fish in the surrounding rivers.

Over the course of his life, Norman worked for the U.S. Forest Service and in area logging camps; received degrees at Dartmouth and the University of Chicago; held a professorship at Chicago; and had a distinguished career as an author. He died in 1990. His best known work, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, is a semi-autobiographical collection of stories about family, fly fishing, and life in Montana. In 1992, Robert Redford directed an adaptation of A River Runs Through It, starring Brad Pitt. Also in 1992, the University of Chicago Press posthumously published Maclean’s book, Young Men and Fire, in which Maclean recounts the tragic Mann Gulch fire that claimed the lives of 13 firefighters on the Helena National Forest in 1949.

Credits and Sources:

The Great Falls Tribune, “125 Montana Newsmakers: Norman F. Maclean,”archive.greatfallstribune.com, accessed August 18, 2014.

“Arrival of Pastor Anxiously Awaited,”The Weekly Missoulian, February 26, 1909.

Maclean, Norman. A River Runs Through It. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

Mathews, Allan James. “A Guide to Historic Missoula,”Montana Mainstreets, vol. 6. Helena: Montana Historical Society, 2003.

Briggeman, Kim. “First Presbyterian Monument to Honor the Rev. Maclean, Architect Gibson. Missoulian, October 8, 2009.

National Park Service. “National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form, Missoula Downtown Historic District.” 2003.

Photographs courtesy of Archives & Special Collections, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Library, The University of Montana, Missoula, Montana.