VICTOR — A good place to start learning about a town’s history is to ask longtime residents or visit a local museum. In Victor, you can do both.
Victor Heritage Museum is celebrating its 35th anniversary this fall. The museum is located in an old train depot and is run entirely by volunteers.
In September 1989, Victor resident and postal worker Peggy Thornbrough decided the town needed a museum and gathered a few neighbors together to get to work.
After a year of bake sales and auctions, they were able to raise $2,000, enough money to move the old train station off Highway 93 to the property at the corner of Blake and Main streets.
The building was fully relocated in December 1990 and opened to the public that winter.
One of the people involved in Thornbrough’s original planning was Joan Hosko, who still works as a volunteer at the museum.
“I consider this museum, the building, the whole thing, my child,” Hosko says. “I’m a true Victorian. I grew up here, went to school here, graduated here, so I have a very strong attachment to the building, the philosophy behind the preservation, everything. I just can’t imagine not being a part of it.”
Hosko also contributed to the museum by helping produce Volume 4 of Bitterroot Trails.
The book recounts Victor’s history through the stories of old families, businesses, community organizations and churches.
“If you don’t preserve it, once it’s gone, you can’t get it back,” she says. “There are a lot of stories with a lot of information. My dad was a great storyteller growing up, about things that happened at Victor and people he knew. So you hear those stories, but you don’t remember them all. And ultimately, even if you know a lot of stuff, if you don’t write it down, it’s lost. One way to preserve it is to write a book, which is what we did.”
Claire Peterson
Joan Hosko talks about the book she helped write, “Bitterroot Trails Volume 4,” which details stories from local organizations and over 80 Victor families.
Through his passion for the museum, Hosko was able to convince some of his friends to join the volunteer team.
Liz Ingraham attended the same school as Hosko and began volunteering in 2021.
The museum displays Victor’s yearbooks through the years, including one showing Ingraham and Hosko attending school together.
“It’s great that the people I grew up with are still friends,” Ingraham said.
Ingraham has lived in Victor since 1949 and remembers watching the first light appear over the Bitterroot Valley. She hopes her contribution to the museum will help pass on her own childhood experiences to younger generations.
“Our history is so fascinating, but I think a lot of young people don’t really get the chance to see how they first grew up without running water or electricity in their homes, and then later on things like telephones came along,” she said. “I think young people need to see that and hear about it.”
Suzanne Thaut graduated from Victor School shortly before Hosko and joined the Victor Heritage Museum board of directors in 2010 as chairperson.
“I want people, especially young people, to think about how things change over time and not just that that’s history, but that history is fluid and always moving,” Thaut said.
Thaut grew up near the Curlew Mine, where residents mined silver until the 1940s.
Looking back on his childhood, Thaut said he remembers exploring the nature near his home, climbing on big tractors and attending taffy pulling parties.
One section of the museum describes life in the Curlew mines and what families like Thaut’s went through.
Thaut hopes that younger generations of students at Victor High School will use the museum as a resource.
“It’s an education,” she says. “I think it’s important for people to honor their memories, but more than anything, I think over time, this is an education. I think if we know how it came about, we appreciate what we have.”
Claire Peterson
Suzanne Thaut, who grew up in Curlew, looks at an exhibit depicting life in the Curlew mines at the Victor Heritage Museum.
The Victor Museum also showcases the influence of the Salish people and Chinese American laborers.
“I think it’s important to remember that there were many different people here who contributed to what is here, and I think what happened to the Salish is very sad,” Thaut said. “The more we know, the more we can appreciate them because we can think about what they were doing, what they were thinking, how they had to work, how they survived.”
The museum is only open from Memorial Day to Labor Day, and several events are held throughout the area throughout the summer.
On July 11 at 6:30 p.m., Bitterroot resident Christopher Weatherly will speak about the blacksmith shop at St. Mary’s Mission.
On Aug. 8, Bitterroot resident Bruce Gould will speak on “The Birth of the Bitterroot Valley” at 6:30 p.m.
The last Sunday in August sees a community-wide ice cream party.
They also host chocolate tasting events in the winter to raise funds.
The museum runs on donations and volunteer work, but would love to see more visitors.
“We want people to know that we have a museum here and to visit more,” said museum volunteer Jenny Becker. “We hope more people will be interested in going to old museums and learning more about the area where they live.”
Becker didn’t grow up in Victor, but he joined the museum team because he was interested in the history of small-town Montana.
“And I became obsessed with the idea of learning all about Victor’s past. Who lived here? How was it built? What was it like 100 years ago? It’s just fascinating to me,” she said.
Now, Becker helps out by entering the museum’s collections into a computer filing system.
The museum has around 10 regular volunteers, all elderly, and Thaut hopes that younger people will become interested in volunteering at the museum.
“I want to see the museum survive, young people come and see it,” she says. “I would hate to see the museum disappear because it can’t survive. We’re doing our best here, but there will come a time when we can’t do it.”
