Remember This? Frontier Town on MacDonald Pass

Frontier Town sat just east of the summit of MacDonald Pass, west of Helena, looking out over the Helena Valley. According to Helena As She Was, John R. Quigley bought 40 acres there from the McIntosh family of Avon in 1946 and spent the rest of his life building it, mostly by hand, out of logs and boulders. His wife Sue ran the gift shop, which the site says paid a lot of the bills.

The bar was the main event. Quigley made it in 1951 and 1952 from a single Douglas fir, split lengthwise into a 50-foot bar with the top half overhead. “I split the log during twenty below zero weather with a chain saw. It took two days to accomplish,” he wrote. The back bar had coin-operated animated dioramas of the Old West.

There was more. Walter and Doris Marshall ran a summer theatre there on a rotating log stage from 1951 to 1954, before they opened the Old Brewery Theatre in Helena. A log chapel was finished in 1961, and Quigley called it his greatest achievement. The place was full of western artifacts he had collected.

Quigley died of cancer on November 24, 1979. His widow sold Frontier Town in 1992 to Richard Pegg, who auctioned off much of the collection in 1994. After years of money and legal trouble, it sold at a sheriff’s auction in 2001 for $190,000 to Tom Battershell, who made it a private residence. It is closed to the public. Please do not drive up and knock.

Remember this place? Tell us what you remember.