Located on the corner of Pattee and East Broadway, Missoula’s first bona fide federal building was completed in 1913. Senator Joseph Dixon, from Missoula, secured funds for its construction, and James Knox Taylor, an architect with the U. S. Treasury Department, designed it. The three-story Italian Renaissance Revival structure’s original tenants were the U. S. Postal Service and the fledgling U. S. Forest Service, a federal agency created by Theodore Roosevelt in 1905.

The building underwent two major expansions. In 1927, U. S. Treasury Department architect James A. Wetmore designed an expansion of the building to the east that served the U.S District Court. Architect Louis A. Simon designed a second enlargement to the building, completed in 1937, on the north side of the Post Office to serve as the U. S. Forest Service Region 1 headquarters.

The Federal Building appeared on the big screen in the 1952 film Red Skies of Montana, starring Richard Widmark, Constance Smith, and Jeffrey Hunter, which was loosely based on the Mann Gulch fire that took the lives of thirteen firefighters, twelve of whom were U. S. Forest Service smokejumpers from Missoula. The majority of postal functions moved out of the building in the mid-1970s, but the “Hellgate Station” post office and the Forest Service Region 1 headquarters remain.

Credits and Sources:

Cohen, Stan. Missoula County Images, volume II. Missoula: Pictorial Histories Publishing Co., 1993.

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

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.