Easement preserves Johnston estate

By CHRIS PETERSON - Hungry Horse News

Dr. Glenn Johnston slogs through the snow to a stone monument on a hillside in front of his home.

He can't help but smile. Some 60 years ago, he and his father were picking rocks out in this field. One rock was too big to pick up with the loader tractor — so the younger Johnston (his father was named Glenn, too), used the loader to roll the big rock up onto this knoll.

Let's have some fun, the elder Johnston thought. So they added a few other rocks onto the larger rock and created a monument. There was no mortar involved. Just rocks stacked on top of rocks. They've been that way ever since. Through wind, rain, storms, lightning, sun — the rocks remain.

Johnston recently did something that's not easy to do in the Flathead Valley anymore. He turned away millions, probably tens of millions, to make sure his rocks stay there. To make sure the family farm — some 700 acres — stays a family farm.

Glenn Johnston and his wife Hazel and son Mark and his granddaughter Katie all made sure the spread along Columbia Falls Stage Road would never be subdivided or developed through a conservation easement brokered through the Flathead Land Trust.

Johnston grew up on this patch of land, left, came back later in life and realized how much he really loved it.

It started with his grandfather LeRoy who homesteaded 160 acres in 1883. Back then the valley was isolated and LeRoy was a true pioneer. He expanded the place by buying out his brother Reuben, who had a homestead adjacent and to the north.

Then Glenn Sr. bought the land from his father and expanded it further.

The elder Johnston was an avid outdoorsman. He was a fur buyer for John Lewis, the same man who built the Lewis Hotel on Lake McDonald (which would later become the site of the Lake McDonald Lodge).

Glenn Sr. added more acreage and purchased more river bottom land. At first glance, it looks like swamp — and it is to a degree. But Glenn Sr. wanted a beaver ranch — a place to raise live beavers. He also loved wildlife and the place was teeming with it. Just about every bird or critter that graces Montana's grand stage has stopped by or calls this spread home.

Johnston said he remembers working on the beaver ranch. They dug out a ditch so the Flathead River would flood the bottomland and then they put up almost a mile of fence, because the state didn't mind the beaver ranch, as long as no wild beavers could get in the impoundment.

The live beavers were then sold to a dealer in Utah that had attracted investors in a plan to raise the animals in pens. Eventually the beaver's fur was used in coats and hats.

But then the fur market collapsed. The beaver ranch went by the wayside. But the land, and the memories, remained. It was a good place to be a kid.

Right at the end of World War II, Johnston went in the Army and worked on an Army newspaper. He then went to Montana State, met and married his wife, Hazel, then after teaching English for a couple of years, went on to medical school, where he became a psychiatrist at the University of Utah Medical Center.

In 1982 he bought the family spread from his mother, Harriet — his father had died in 1965 — with the idea of keeping it intact.

In 1997 he retired and moved back home.

The idea has always been to preserve the land. He talked with his son, Mark, and granddaughter Katie — the heirs to the place — and they, too, wanted it to remain a farm and a family home as well.

That's not an easy thing to do, Johnston noted. Not with taxes and land prices in the tens of thousands of dollars for just an acre.

Johnston recalls a business associate who said it's bad business to fall in love with land.

"What better thing is there to fall in love with?" Johnston asks.

Hazel gives credit to her son and his wife, Joan, and their granddaughter, who now is 18. They supported the decision to place the conservation easement on the ranch. They were willing to give up real financial value to preserve the family history and the wildlife habitat here. They chose a different path. A path that recognizes the value of open spaces and ancient trees.

The Johnstons continue to own the land. It remains private property and still pays taxes. It is not government owned or manipulated, they note.

Hazel recalls an incident at the mailbox just a few weeks ago. A man in a car was driving by and he saw her at the mailbox. He asked her if she knew who owned this land. He said a developer from California had flown over and was eyeing it for a big real estate venture.

She told the man, without revealing who she was, that she happened to know that the land was going to be put under a conservation easement, forever.

"Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!" the man said.

Hazel laughs.

"So you've met the 'stupid' Johnstons," she said with a smile.