Stratton family members recall homestead life in Flathead Valley

In the early part of the 1900s, a man living in Unionville, Missouri grew frustrated of the dry growing season and decided to take advantage of the Homestead Act. Frank Stratton picked up his wife Minnie and their family of eight children and put everything they owned on a train headed for Montana.

He arrived in Bad Rock Canyon looking for a fertile place to grow a garden. He homesteaded in Martin City before the Hungry Horse Dam made it a boomtown in the late 1940s. His homestead was up the hill from Malvina and Casper Martin’s homestead, for which the town is named.

The large family lived in a cozy one-room house with “wall-to-wall beds,” Kendi Strowbridge of Columbia Falls said while recalling memories shared by her relatives. She is Frank’s great-granddaughter.

Since then, the Stratton family has grown in numbers and some have moved out of state. The homestead no longer exists since the creation of U.S. Highway 2.

Life happens and people age whether or not anyone takes notice, Strowbridge observed.

“As we all know, time has a way of whisking by and the years continue to multiply and still families are unable to get together,” she said in an email.

So, she planned the Stratton family’s first reunion.

They gathered in Kalispell for two days at the beginning of August. Relatives traveled from Florida, Washington and even New Delhi, India. David Chock works for Ford in India and hasn’t visited Columbia Falls since he was 12 years old.

The reunion had special timing because it fell on the 75th birthday of Strowbridge’s mother Sandy Loveall. Sandy’s father, Boyd Stratton, was one of the eight children to come with Frank from Missouri.

The family surprised her with a birthday party surrounded by 63 of her relatives.

“Walking in there (the Woodland Park pavilion) and just seeing all those beautiful, beautiful smiling faces. And I knew. I knew them all. I didn’t know about my party. But I did know all of them,” she said. It was a memorable moment.

It’s a wonder that she’s close to her family since her grandma Lena O’Neal raised her. Boyd’s wife Helen died in 1942, when Sandy was only two years old. Sandy was the youngest of five children. She went to live with her grandma until she was out of high school. They moved around a bit from East Glacier to Apgar and finally to West Glacier where she took the bus to school from sixth grade and on. Her older siblings—Virginia, Norma Williams, Francis and Frank Stratton—stayed in touch by visiting her often. They lived on the homestead with their father and were raised by their grandparents Frank and Minnie.

“We felt safe with them (the grandparents),” Norma Williams of Columbia Falls said. “They took good care of us.”

It seems strange that Sandy was separate from the other children. A little more of the story told by Norma brings out the details. In 1942, during World War II, the Strattons left the homestead and went to work at a shipyard in Seattle, Washington. They returned in 1946, after the war ended, but Sandy stayed in Montana with grandma O’Neal.

Despite the troubles that the Stratton children faced, they had a great childhood on the homestead. Norma said they enjoyed the cows, chickens and vegetables.

That is just what Frank was dreaming of when he brought his family from Missouri.