Saving the Burg is made possible with support from the Greater Montana Foundation encouraging communications on issues, trends and values of importance to Montanans.

- [Narrator] A mile up, in the Montana Rockies, nestled in a high mountain valley, is a small town of about 900 people.

It's not on the way to anywhere.

It's a half-hour detour off the interstate.

It was born 150 years ago when there was wealth in the rocks.

The big money rolled in and built a mining town.

And for the better part of a century, it was a busy place.

Folks worked hard in the mines and mills, until things tapered off.

Then the big money rolled out and left it to die.

But a generation ago, something interesting happened.

Natives and newcomers didn't give up.

Individually and together, they invested time and treasure to save their community.

Today, it's one of the most beloved small towns in Montana: Philipsburg, big sky country's comeback kid.

This is the story of how that happened.

(bright music) (camera clicking) (pensive music) - The book had several purposes.

One was to expose the students to in-depth photo stories.

I wanted the students to live, eat, and breathe the people of Philipsburg, to study the history, the sociology, the economics.

Beforehand, they had basically 24 hours that they could be photographing them for six days and nights.

- I came in and spent a week here, and I don't know how many others there were, probably 12, or so, students and a couple of professors.

And just kind of inundated ourselves in the town and took photos of everything we could find.

- I was a deputy working for the sheriff here at the time.

Why would anybody want to photograph Philipsburg?

You know, there really wasn't anything to see here.

It was pretty much a gray town.

Not a heck of a lotta hope, really.

At least, the kids didn't have much hope.

- I remember being down, like across the street from the theater, and I remember seeing this huge group of people running around with cameras, and they all had notebooks, and I believe clipboards, if I remember right.

I'm like, oh, my gosh, what's goin' on?

Because it was dull and boring here.

(laughing) - [Elderly Man] The students, they really did a thorough job of finding what was going on.

They took lots of pictures.

- Oh, my goodness!

Yes, I remember all of these kids in here.

- Literally, the same week they're taking pictures for that book is when I show up in town, because in one of the pictures in the book, I remember being at that auction, so I'd probably been here maybe a month when the photo journalism class comes from U of M, and is taking pictures for the master's thesis, you know, focused on Philipsburg.

- I thought it was delightful, I really did.

I loved that it included all ages, and it included just about every activity you could even imagine.

- We kinda did a gathering, and we kinda had a little gallery of dog photos that each one of us took, 'cause we noticed there were a lot of dogs running around town.

(dogs barking) (lively music) - We didn't want to do a National Geographic approach to the town.

We didn't want it to be all positive, necessarily.

We wanted to reflect what was happening at that time.

There were pregnant teenagers, there were kids smoking, there were late night parties, all part of almost every small town in America.

So what we wanted to do was accurately reflect what was happening at the time that we were there.

- No, when that book came out, I was mortified, to be honest.

I mean, here was this girl on one page hugging a little boy and coloring with a little boy, and on the opposite page, sitting in a basement with a Schmidt in her hand.

Like, there's the true Mary Jo, the devil on one page, and the angel on the other.

(laughing) - [Patty] And one of the reasons why I carefully included the other photograph of her was because it reflected her caring, as well as her being a kid.

- To this day, I think it kind of embarrasses me a little bit, but then when I think hard about it, that's what Philipsburg was.

Was it right?

No.

Was it legal?

Certainly not.

But that was our entertainment.

It was depressed, and there was no work, and there was no activity.

- For students in particular, it's very important for them to understand that they had to reflect what was happening in front of them.

- Everybody was just real, very real people, and easy to talk to.

- People, at their base and core, they were friendly, but there was also a rough side, and it was a very depressed economy, very depressed environment here.

It was pretty gray.

Much of Montana was, but in particular, Philipsburg.

And it seemed like a very depressed area, economically speaking, but people had spirit and they were very friendly.

- People were talking a lot about history, not as much about the present, interestingly enough.

- My folks moved here to manage the Pintler Hotel, where the museum is today.

We had no vacancy signs up all year-round.

- When I came here, every man that wanted to work could go to work.

All workers, I don't think we knew what a tourist was.

- It was a busy place, people had money to spend.

- 300 guys worked in the mines and stuff.

Town was good.

- [Town Resident] There was a great deal of logging, two sawmills right within walking distance.

- [Town Resident] Black Pine Mine was running.

- [Town Resident] All the mines were goin'.

- [Town Resident] We had a smelter.

- You could walk into an establishment, and there'd be a line of people from end to end.

I first came to Philipsburg fishing with my dad in 1978.

Forty years ago.

And we were staying in an old cabin on Rock Creek.

And we didn't know anything about the town before we drove into town for dinner and a drink.

And the bars were busy.

It was a friendly blue collar town.

And we met some miners and a lot of guys who just got off from one of the say mills - They would go to work.

When they got paid, what did they do?

They did whatever they could for entertainment, and a lot of the entertainment was drinkin'.

I remember in the White Front, there's this wall of photos.

And it was of all the workers drinking next to you.

Kinda neat.

If you drank enough, you got famous I guess.

- We had the camera around the bar so we just started takin' pictures of people.

And thank God we did.

There's still a lot of pictures in the White Front of those people.

And it's kind of interesting because somebody will come to town, and they won't know anything about their relatives.

They can say, well, go up at the White Front, and look in to see a picture of that guy on the wall.

Then they put a star on there when he's died.

900 people now.

There were 3000 here at one time.

They wanted to be the State Capitol.

The cemetery when you look at it.

Take us a couple hundred years to fill it.

But they thought, they were going to be that big.

- There was lots of activity, there was lots of money.

- It was an old mining town.

It was pretty interesting.

- There was always ore trucks running through town, you know, haulin' to the manganese mill, and there was just a constant commotion.

We thought we had a job the rest of our life.

- It was vibrant, to a degree, but it didn't last.

(soft tense music) - I remember the day the Anaconda Company shut down.

I come home here and my wife was cryin', 'cause she said, "People don't realize what this is."

And boy, that was the end.

- The moment that I thought the end was here was when I heard on the radio, in my kitchen, that the smelter and Anaconda had closed.

And that affected everybody because it was such a huge employer, and created so many different types of jobs.

And a lot of people from Philipsburg had had those jobs for generations and generations.

They believed it would go on forever, everybody did.

And when that happened, it was like, oh, dear God, what could happen next?

- Things were kinda unsettled around the world.

Employment was kinda tight.

- It just tanked.

I mean, it was so much unemployment, and so many people had to leave.

- The decline in economic stability in the '80s, the economy just went bust.

It was awful.

- Like Anaconda in some ways, everybody said, well, with the smelter closure, it's gonna dry up and blow away.

Well, that did not occur.

- I think there's several things that pretty much kept the town on life support, as far as economics going.

That was, number one, it was county seat.

- [Town Resident] We had logging and the ranching.

- [Town Resident] The mining was very minor, just about non-existent.

- In the '70s and '80s, I mean, it was just such a dreary town.

You came here and it was just a downer.

- It was on its way to being another ghost town.

It was pretty dire.

It was awful.

- There was a point in time, to my understanding, when they woulda bulldozed the town, but they couldn't afford to, because it was in such bad shape, and nobody saw any future here.

- Right after Black Pine shut its doors, I think that's when everybody finally realized that we're in trouble.

- By '86, it was pretty much over.

It started up again a couple times, but it didn't last very long.

- [Mary Jo] When I think of Philipsburg in the '80s, I think gray and dreary, and hopeless, really.

- This town was dying.

You could buy houses for as low as $1,500.

It was pretty much a ghost town.

- Weathered wood, paint just peeling off of buildings, it wasn't just that people didn't care.

It was just that there was no hope in town because as you get farther away from that mine closing, there's fewer and fewer dollars.

- You coulda bought the whole town for probably $100,000.

- God, if I'da had $100,00, I'da owned P-burg.

I coulda just put a gate down there, literally.

- It was truly already built, but the spirit was gone.

The spirit was gone.

I came back to P-burg with my family on a sunny summer day in 91.

And the economy had obviously changed.

- To live in a place like this would have been horrifying.

It was beautiful, but it was bleak.

It was pretty bleak, there was nothing happening.

As a marketing guy, I saw a lot of things.

I wrote them down.

I had this 1991 Montana Vacation Guide and I wrote them on the back.

Half way between Yellowstone and Glacier.

Half way between Seattle and Salt Lake.

Seriously economically depressed.

Average precipitation-- 15 inches.

That means a lot to somebody from Seattle.

And I wasn't the only one.

That was 91.

But Tim Dringle had already bought his building-- The Opera House from an owner in Olympia.

And he'd been operating the theatre for this absentee owner.

And the owner offered to sell it to him.

- He said, "Okay, I'll sell it to you."

I went, I don't know about that.

I said it's probably more of a building than I could handle, and he kept saying no, he said, "You're the only one that can."

Finally, it was in '88 that we actually made the deal to purchase, and I was still a little bit leery.

But here it is 30 years later, and I'm still here, so.

- I first came to Philipsburg in 1990.

It was nothing like where I had lived anywheres else.

Quaint, quaint little town, so I fell in love with that, and I fell in love with the terrain.

I wanted to come out here and play mountain man.

- I'm reading an article in Antique Week, and it says the only antique dealers who have money at the end of their career are those who actually buy their buildings, as opposed to rent 'em.

Well, there I am, I'm sitting in a rented building, and I think, hmm, I should go find out how much this is actually going to cost me to buy.

(laughing) And that's what I did.

But I came back in the winter of 91.

And I bought a building.

I bought the empty mercantile.

It was the biggest retail space in town for $3.50 a square foot.

And I really didn't know what I was going to do with it.

Empty old building--no revenue.

A friend-Dr.

Pritchard-another Washintonian here told me about a lady who'd been managing the gen line that I should meet.

And that's when I met and hired Shirley Beck to help us create an antique mall in the empty lower floor.

And that was my introduction to one of the most dynamic human beings I've ever worked with.

Hurricane Shirley.

We tried hard.

We had a wonderful gal, KD tried to run the antique mall but it really wasn't doing much.

Shirley had partnered with Dale who was a gemologist who developed a heat treating process.

And he and Shirley started talking and decided that they wanted to go into business together.

A jewelry business in the old mercantile.

And they started in the mercantile and the next thing you know, they bought their own building.

And they've been there ever since.

(upbeat music) - I remember when Shirley came in, and things were pickin' up, and things were gettin' crazy.

- Shirley Beck and her crew have been phenomenal.

- I was inspired by Shirley Beck.

- Shirley Beck.

- Shirley Beck.

- She has so much energy.

She's the bunny, the Energizer Bunny.

- Philipsburg was still dying.

We had the bank behind us to make something happen, but people coulda bought and sold us so many times over.

- Here before 13 businesses closed on Main Street, so this was not something that was a guarantee by any means.

Matter of fact, we practically got laughed out of the lumber yard when we told them we're opening a jewelry store in Philipsburg.

(laughing) - But they had no risk left in them.

That was taken away.

This is what this new group of people, little by little as they came, they were willing to take risks again.

It was a wave of risk takers.

- You gotta have the people with the enthusiasm and guts.

I, as a person who lived here, wouldn't even have considered something like this today.

No way.

(bright pensive music) There's a favorite saying you hear from ranchers in particular that if somebody is a hard worker, dependable, you say "He's a good hand."

And we never could have saved this place if it hadn't been the local craftsmen to get the work done.

I can't name them all but I know Window Joe and Cactus.

Everybody had nicknames.

In 91, the summer of 91, they painted the Sayers building and that was a catalyst.

- The bank foreclosed on the Sayer building, and it was Jerry's idea that he should really fancy it up in order for it to sell.

And they painted it yellow and green, and it looked really nice.

- It was like the painted lady in town.

These metal fronts really gave us something to work with.

You know, Mesker fronts were a big part of the West as these boom towns needed to look permanent in a hurry.

So, Mesker's was the leading company and sent out catalogs And you could buy a front that matched what you built and make it look like it had been there forever.

- It's already there, you just have to call attention to it.

And so, that's what these beginning people did, and a fresh coat of paint is like a little mascara, helps a lot, these fading, aging buildings.

- Liv did a tremendous job painting.

To see her at her age climbin' a 20-foot ladder without any scaffolding, without any life support.

When I got here, most of them had been painted over just to save money.

They didn't want to paint the detail.

But for example on the Sayres, when they were repainted so the original features, the bullseyes, the filligrees.

When Joan Cackus did that, it was stunning.

- Whatever caused the people's reaction to that caused a ping-pong of painting to go on back and forth in town.

It was beautiful.

- The bank actually would buy the paint if somebody would give it a fresh coat of paint.

- That was the concept behind it, was paint these buildings, freshen 'em up, make 'em look like people might actually care about how the buildings look.

Painting was just part of what these old buildings needed.

I can't begin to emphasize the challenges of remodeling.

- You know, we have infrastructure problems in this town because nobody would do anything.

Anybody who bought one of these buildings coulda told you that (laughing) because every one of these buildings had problems.

The bones were good.

But people hadn't invested re-invested in decades.

And I don't think we could have done it without the help from local tradespeople.

One who really raised the bar was Barry Carnahan.

Barry would go buy an old building.

Make it look like it used to.

- He's rotated through a bunch of buildings here, and he had fixed them up and moved to the next one.

- [Town Resident] Barry Carnahan was a wonderful carpenter, and he did the fronts of the buildings that we did.

- [Town Resident] He brought back the original integrity on a lot of these old buildings.

So luckily there were enough local people not only willing but capable of helping us fix it.

They needed work and we needed help.

- The Philipsburg post office had made a decision, or the government had, that there was going to be a new post office situated outside of town on the highway, Highway 1.

So we decided that we would have something to say about it.

A bunch of bureaucrats in Washington DC don't think about 93-year-old John Murphet walking to the post office everyday and meeting his friends and neighbors there.

We don't have home delivery.

So you have to go to the post office.

If you put our post office out of town, you're gonna kill a big part of this town.

So we started with a petition that asked that the post office be relocated in the town of Philipsburg, and not out on the highway.

Finally, they came up with a place down at the end of the street, and we said, well, okay, that's okay, but we wanna have a say in what it looks like.

It's incredible what that did because we went up against the feds and we won.

- [Town Resident] Think of how important that is.

This saved the town, I think.

When you look back on the 1990's, there were so many small victories.

People set their own goal in their own small way.

And that really starts to add up.

The voters agreed to tax themselves to renovate the historic school.

That was a big deal.

That's the oldest operating school in the state.

It's such a beautiful building.

That says a lot to me.

That people who were still here wanted to preserve history.

- One of my goals was this was built as a live theater.

Originally, that's what it was.

So my goal was always to bring back live theater.

♪ I was born to sing and dance ♪ - [Theater Owner] Which we have done and been running for 17 years now, me and Claudette.

- The bank president, very instrumental in the street light project.

- Street lights, I couldn't believe when they put those things up.

I got a call from Jerry Sullivan, the bank president, who said Jim we're going to put in new street lights but I'd like you to buy one for the front of H&R.

How much is a street light?

Well they're $4000.

Can I make payments?

How about a hundred a month.

And he says, "Sure.

How about prime plus one and I'll send you over the paperwork?"

- [Town Resident] That's incredible, think of that, when you pull all those people in.

And they helped to rebuild the town lighting.

- [Town Resident] It just made all the ambiance even better.

And that is why there is a street light in front of H&R.

And why there are 40 of them in town.

How do you say no to that?

It's that kind of "High Tide Rises all Boats."

- Ron came up with the idea, cultural center.

And I said, really?

Okay, cultural center, we'll do it.

- The bank repossesses a building, the doors are closed, it's shuttered.

- The Pintler Hotel, where the museum is today, that was sold for a dollar.

They had to sell it for somethin'.

It was either that or tear it down.

- And of course, we got the museum for nothing.

- And most of it was like all volunteer, like the museum, just went over there with a shovel and started shovelin' crap off the floor and puttin' it in dumpsters and things.

- [Town Resident] And then all the people in town helped just clean up the museum.

- [Town Resident] And here's a group of maybe 10 or 12 people, which probably grew to, like, two dozen people, who were interested in saving the building and having a museum for Granite County.

- [Town Resident] I'll never forget that, all those sinks and tubs, and things that we ended up throwing out the window or selling in a sale we held.

- [Town Resident] There were a lot of volunteers who, for no money, worked in that building.

Once they put the Sapphire Gallery on the map, Shirley and Dale had another trick up their sleeve.

And this one has proved to be an even bigger draw.

- We're looking at Philipsburg as being some kinda destination travel place.

Shirley came up with this idea, and we started doing research, as we're driving around the country going to mineral shows and whatnot.

- I'd been looking for a place for a candy store with Dale for four years.

We were in every candy store in the Western United States, Roswell, New Mexico, Olympia, Washington.

- [Dale] Boy, that was probably only five years after we had opened the jewelry store, because, you know, people buy jewelry for special occasions, they buy it for engagements and graduations and Christmas presents and birthdays.

You know, it's not an everyday thing.

- We were gonna open at 10 o'clock on Sunday morning.

We'd put out all the advertising on TV, all the advertising on the web.

And I get a phone call from the priest of the Catholic church, and he said, "Shirley, this is not fair.

"Church is at 10, it is not fair.

"You have to at least give me an hour."

So we changed grand opening to 11 o'clock.

And so, I look out at 10 o'clock, at 10:30, there's nobody in the street.

There was no cars, and I said we are so sunk, oh, my gosh!

We're half a million dollars in debt on this one alone, half a million, and we're not gonna make it.

And at 11 o'clock, when we opened the doors and pulled up the blinds so they could see in, it was solid people to the other side of the street, and down there as far as you could see waiting to get in.

And we did the whole first three months' projected business in one day because they saw what had happened, they saw what was gonna happen.

Did you see the movie Chocolat?

Do you know what that changed that town?

That's what it did.

People grinned at each other for no other reason.

We have a candy store!

We have something that nobody else has.

It was a glowing pink thing that just poofed all over the town.

It was just like Chocolat.

(lively music) - Some of the biggest successes come from the mixing of the old guard, let's say, and it melds with the new blood, especially when the project's good.

You know, by the time we all survived Y2K, it was obvious the buying property a decade before had been a pretty good call.

- The people of P-burg got behind themselves and said, hell, we live in this town, let's see what we could do to make this town a boomer.

- Todd King came here and he put a lot of money into re-fixing this town.

- Fine, fine designer.

- His building is absolutely beautiful.

- [Town Resident] And he had one building up here that was the old grocery store, completely gutted it.

- I had a vision of what this town could be, and I started buying buildings.

I ended up buying five of 'em, and took 'em on as summer projects, re-doing 'em, which was quite a feat.

I ended up traveling a lot with my other job, and when I'd find these different architectural pieces at salvage places, wherever I was, here or overseas, I would buy them.

Then I would ship them back to Philipsburg, incorporating 'em in the buildings.

Todd raised the bar.

We decided to go all in and finally turn the upstairs of our building into what I thought was still missing in the equation and that was lodging.

- We had a plan, 2003, we had a plan.

We were going to make a little boutique hotel.

Well there's so many things that went into creating the Broadway.

We had a good design.

We want to do nine rooms.

People do not realize how much work it took to save these buildings.

Some had decades of deferred maintenance.

Leaky roofs.

Old lathe and plaster.

Floors covered with gnarly, cheap linoleum.

We had a certified plumber, electrician, and then we had a cadre of friends, volunteers, family, who came and helped us do this.

I got a quote on putting a big sign outside.

I want to do something historic.

Old-fashioned old western type.

- [Hotel Owner] Like they did in the 1890s, and I think the lowest bid was about $6,000.

So I said wait a minute, I could probably do that.

So that Broadway sign, I painted with a local kid named Casey Op.

We got it done in a couple days.

- [Susan] We started in April, and we finished in December.

It was pretty amazing.

♪ Tomorrow's another day ♪ ♪ And I'm thirsty anyway ♪ ♪ So bring on the rain ♪ Helen.

Songwriter.

Singer.

- Philipsburg fell in love with Helen Darling.

She was a movie star.

- But she became quite famous.

She sang with Garth Brooks, she was a songwriter.

- She had a great hit at 9-11, Bring On the Rain.

- And Helen would do these fundraisers where she would have a function called Writers in the Round.

It was a community event that had an enourmous following.

And the first year, it filled the Opera House Theatre.

- [Judy] And she, with her husband, Dennis, produced this Writers in the Round.

She did these fundraisers for over a decade.

And the money went for restoration of our town hall, and sculpture in the front.

- I think the town hall was $100,000 it ended up costing.

It was all paid for through those concerts, so.

- And we had it here in the hotel, in this space here.

- [Town Resident] And she'd invite all these writers in that would come in and donate their time, and sit there and do this performance.

- [Susan] Everyone was standing, and they were on stools right in the center.

It was amazing.

- [Town Resident] Helen had a beautiful voice.

You would think she was Beyonce, the way she sold out that theater year after year.

- There were not tickets to be had.

People would wait in line.

We bartered with our plumber to get tickets.

I said if you come and fix my plumbing, I will get you a ticket.

In 2003, Rotary asked its clubs what they're going to do fot the Centennial of Rotary.

The club decided--fix the ice rink.

- The Rotary rink project, that was a whirlwind, wasn't it?

We got Montana Tech involved.

They came to town, and they gave us a plan and it was way beyond what we imagined.

But I just couldn't understand an NHL-sized hockey rink in Philipsburg, Montana.

- The Winninghoffs gave us the land, you know, in perpetuity, as long as it belonged to the town.

- So long as they used it for a skating rink or a park of some sort or another.

They gave us more than we bargained for.

When we showed people the plans and got started on it, I've never had an easier time fundraising.

It rained money.

People loved the idea.

- [Susan] Everything was done by volunteer.

- [Town Resident] Thousands of man hours, donations.

- [Susan] The excavator, Phil, he did all of the scooping out to make the auditorium seating.

Originally, we would've been happy with a little warming shed and, you know, a flooded arena.

The Donlan family gave us a zamboni.

And so we had to build a bigger building to house it.

- When Donlan bought the Zamboni, it was like get a Zamboni and we'll build around it.

- [Susan] Wally Stanghill did the warming hut, which is beautiful.

Toby Donald built the original arena.

Ed Lord, when he retired as a rancher, joined Rotary and said, you know that arena could be a little bigger.

You mind if I work on it.

He showed up with his own bulldozer and spent the summer doubling the size of the arena.

So it's now a capacity of 3000 people.

And we know that capacity because we've had 3000 people come to town for a concert.

- [Judy] The Rotary has totally changed from being a small little entity to probably the biggest moneymaker in town that brings in the most people, and has done a tremendous job with Winninghoff Park and the ice rink.

- [Town Resident] I don't know, I think it was just one of the biggest things in this state for a small town to do that, have a half-a-million-dollar rink in your backyard.

But we've always had good events.

- [Town Resident] An early catalyst was the accordion festival in '97, I think.

That was the first time we started to block Broadway to have a downtown celebration.

And Todd got a great team to run an art and jazz festival there for years.

(upbeat music) The Chamber of Commerce has kept Valley Days alive.

And now that has expanded to a car show.

Just unbelievable.

How many people and the color of the cars and the people that come.

After Valley Days, there's a community effort which was created to give kids a free place to go to a carnival.

I've driven fire trucks at Valley Days for 15 years.

And the number of children you see now at Valley Days, it's gotta be five times what it used to be.

They come to town because it's a family event.

- We had a really strong core of people that had put a lot of money into this project, and a lot of their heart.

- All of us together organized something called Philipsburg Promotions, where we threw money in the pot and said what can we do to keep bringing this town up and creating more things for people to do?

- [Peggie] There was a passion to keep her on the map and make her pretty again.

- You must commit a percentage of your business gross to advertising, so for 26 years in the Sapphire Gallery, Dale and I have committed 6% of our gross to advertising, and 20 years in The Sweet Palace.

And so, our advertising is in the multiple millions.

They've been loyal to that idea.

And that has had a huge effect on people's knowledge of Philipsburg.

There's a newspaper called Philipsburg Territory that goes back to the 70's.

And they distribute those all over Montana.

All over the West.

The circulation--press run.

I think it's up to 45,000 now every year.

I think that makes us the largest circulation newspaper in the state.

I mean, Philipsburg is doing, the Chamber on its own supported by advertisers from local businesses.

And that brings people from all over.

- So I knew that we, as a group, were all doing something right, and it was bringing people in, and it was bringing people back.

- You keep going until finally, the teeter-totter begins to tip, and that's exactly what happened.

- [Town Resident] It's very ironic that before the 1990s, the thing that Philipsburg was most famous for was a poem by Richard Hugo.

It called us out by name as a dreary place.

Degrees in Gray in Philipsburg.

Not Degrees of Gray in a Small Town.

But Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.

Ouch!

That's not much of a branding slogan.

- [Richard] You might come here Sunday on a whim, say your life broke down, the last good kiss you had was years ago.

You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn't last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives.

Only churches are kept up.

The jail turns 70 this year.

The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he's done.

The principal supporting business now is rage, hatred of the various grays.

- [Town Resident] In researching Hugo's work, we found original black and white film footage that Annick Smith and her husband took of Hugo when they got him to visit Philipsburg in 1966.

And this film shows Richard Hugo here for the first time, walking in front of the huge and decaying stamp mill, and through the town, the shuttered buildings.

And it was after this film of his visit was shot that Hugo went home and wrote Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg, and called Annick Smith the next morning and read it to her.

- That poem depicted a town that was so sad, you felt like hanging your head.

And it felt like the rain was beating you down.

So our early image, when you think about Philipsburg was gray.

A sad poem.

And we had a wonderful book.

But black and white photos of what the late 80's were like.

And that was nice but it showed us warts and all.

By the new millenium though after the 90's, we had a new place; we had a new image.

And our publicity really started to change.

One lucky break was when Montana Living, which is a coffee table, read at home coffee table magazine, told our story.

And they called it The Little Town That Could.

And that issue ended up on the desk of the producer of the NBC Today Show in New York City.

And the next thing we knew, Bob Dotson arrived in the dead of winter to do a story on us.

- [Bob] In this high mountain valley, far from the rest of us, is the kind of place America used to hear about, where people survive without federal aid or giant corporations.

Philipsburg, Montana is a working class town that gets things done the pioneer way, together.

The Today Show piece is just one example.

It got so when the media did show up they always came away with good material.

Things were happening.

And that kind of noteriety feeds on itself.

And I know there are people living here now the moved here; that invested here, specifically because of the way Bob Dotson portrayed Philipsburg.

- Of all the positive print and TV we've had, and awards that we've won, there's one, to me, that best symbolizes our 30 of struggle.

- We won first place.

- Wow, when you win a national competition for the best reinvention of a town... Sunset Magazine is the premiere travel magazine in the West.

And they have the Best of the West awards every year.

- There were some big names there.

Reno, Sacramento, Alameda.

- And we were up against towns of greater size, much greater size, 100,000 people, 250,000 people.

Big towns and big money.

Plans.

Federal money.

State money.

And for little old Philipsburg, you know, 950 people, to win the national award for best reinvention of a town, that's huge.

There was no plan laid out, we're gonna do this, this, this, and that.

- There was never a plan.

- I don't know if there was a plan.

- No plan.

- The only plan was is to keep it from fallin' down.

- Grassroots all the way to simply reinvent ourselves into something old and new at the same time.

- This is just people coming into town and saying, "Wow, I'm gonna do this."

And that happens, and another person a year later comes along and says, "I'll do this."

And more and more and more, and pretty soon, it's like that freight train that just won't stop.

- Any magazine that would have given us an award, I would have been surprised at because it was so, so very depressed.

And now, it's a flourishing town.

- And I'm so proud that we won that award.

- Oh, very proud.

- Obviously, it was pretty darned important.

(laughing) Look at the other things we've accomplished.

Our light poles, the flowers that go on our light poles in the summertime, our Rotary park, our ice rink.

We don't accomplish those things without working together.

You don't support breweries without working together.

You don't support flower shops without working together.

- You know, this Rob Jarvis, he come on into town, I was one of the first guys that ever met him.

He wanted to start that brewery.

I told him, I says you got a hole in the head.

He said, "My good gosh, you're goofy."

- Rob Jarvis.

(laughing) The year after we bought the mercantile, in 1991, Rob bought the Sayrs building next door, and he was from Washington too.

And he wasn't in as much of a hurry as we were.

I mean, he wanted to build a brewery.

- I was havin' a beer in the club bar, and looked over at the Sayrs building and saw that it had recently been repainted.

Thought that it would be a place that maybe some day, we could do a brewery in.

- I mean, I just couldn't believe it.

I thought how in the hell can he be so stupid?

I know so much, and he doesn't know nothing, ya know?

I spent years in the bar business.

What the hell does he know about them?

- But it took a little while, it took 20 years, in fact.

And my favorite thing to tease Rob was to say that he was on his third opening soon sign.

- Always had a sign in, brewery yet to come, and I never thought it would happen, but it did.

- People would ask when is that gonna open, when is that going to open?

- But when he did finally open with Cathy and Nolan Smith enlisted to help him, that was monumental.

- I was a sales manager for a cell phone company, and it was time for me to get out of the business.

And Rob, who had the building, asked if Nolan and I would partner up with him because he wasn't living in town, and we absolutely jumped at the chance.

- Our expectations were really low when we opened the brewery, not knowing how our small town would embrace craft beer.

- State law is 48 ounces per day per person, so that's only three beers per person, and we're a town of 800.

It didn't quite pencil out.

- So the first year we were open, we started out with two styles of beer, and we only had two fermenters.

We thought that'd be sufficient for our little town, and within months, we realized we didn't have enough brewing equipment, and people demanded more volume and more styles because our product really took off.

- [Cathy] Both of the head brewers are very, very well-trained.

Cleanliness is the biggest thing, our tanks and our hoses.

They make sure everything's top-notch.

We only buy whole cone hops, which most breweries don't do.

It's a little more labor-intensive for the brewers, but we think it makes better beer, so we do that.

Our barley is Montana barley.

I think all the ingredients, and with their attention to detail, it makes great beer.

We had this brewery three years up and running, we just ran outta space.

People were begging for the product on the shelf, so we needed a bigger facility.

So Nolan and I bought the old water bottling plant, which is the original site of the brewery 147 years ago.

- [Nolan] When we started our business, we started out with three employees.

As we've grown our business, we've been able to hire, I believe we have 17 employees now in our company.

And for a small town, Montana, having 17 employees is huge.

- [Cathy] Seven of our people have bought houses here, so they can stay.

So we're always adding on people.

It's a great job, they love working here, and they can afford to live here.

We're distributing in most of Montana.

We still have it on the Hi-Line in Great Falls, but we want to be all over Montana.

That's our goal right now, and then we'll go from there.

- Boy, I tell ya, I've had to eat my words, haven't I?

You know, that brewery's a growin' concern.

- There's almost 80 breweries in Montana now, and there's KettleHouse, and Big Sky, and Black Smith.

And you tell me where any of those are from, but I'll tell ya, if you have a nice beer and it says Philipsburg Brewing Company, you know where that's from.

And if it's great beer and you enjoy it, you want to come to Philipsburg.

- The brewery is probably the biggest thing that ever happened to Philipsburg, and not just because of the beer, which is, you know, award-winning.

It is the place where everybody goes to see one another, it's the place where new people come.

- [Town Resident] Brings a sense of community to the people.

It's kind of a gathering point, where people can sit down, enjoy a beer, be here with their family.

- [Jim] Well, after everything we'd done for 20 years, here comes this marvelous brewery right in the corner of town, and that was the icing on the comeback cake.

When I got asked to do this film for the sesquicentennial, I really wanted to show how dramatic a shift natives and newcomers had achieved from those days when this class of college kids came and shot black and white photos.

So we decided to invite Todd Goodrich and Brian Keller, who were students in that project, to come back to see what P-burg was like today, and meet, again, with Mary Jo.

- Todd?

Been a long time.

- Very long time.

- 31 years.

- Oh, my God, we both look a lot older, don't we?

- Absolutely, good to see ya.

- It's good to see you.

- Watched your work for years.

- You have?

- In the alumni magazines.

- Alumni magazine, yeah.

- Great job.

We were here in '87, so I stopped by the following year and haven't been back since.

Awesome, what a great shot!

Look at the timing too, perfect, just frozen in time.

That's the cover shot.

That's a great shot.

- [Todd] That is a nice shot, I really like that.

- I've been thinking about what happened in the lives of a lot of those kids, out of those children, whether they're in the area still or have taken off.

- I was lookin' at this, wonder where these guys are now.

I mean, are they in the area?

- [Town Resident] You're gonna meet the lady on the far right.

- [Todd] Oh, are we really?

- [Jim] We also brought back Mary Jo to meet the photographers, because of all the people in that book, of all the young people in that book, she had the most interesting arc of her life.

And it was great when we put them together.

- There's my grandpa!

- Where's Grandpa?

- That's my grandpa!

- [Brian] That's grandpa, he was a welder?

- Oh, my God, that is hilarious!

- Is that you?

- Yes.

- [Brian] Then the other shot of you over here helping the kids, tutoring and mentoring.

- And then for them to put the book, like, to have the pictures, like, you know, we could have put this, like, somewhere other than on this, or right next to this page.

- I think it makes a statement that we all-- - That we all are just awful, and we're all nice sometimes.

- That's right.

Well, look how you turned out!

(energetic music) Wow, oh, my goodness!

- [Todd] It's beautiful.

- Things look more colorful now.

I don't think it's just because we were taking photos in black and white.

I think they've dressed things up a lot more.

I love it, I love it.

I'm glad we didn't pick another town.

- It's still got the mining town feel to it.

- Mm-hmm.

This has all changed.

None of this was like this, and it wasn't this colorful.

It was depressed.

Nice people, but depressed.

A lot of closed storefronts, from what I recall.

So much was rundown back then, and it's really popped.

Maybe I'll retire out here.

This is the candy store?

Oh, boy, I gotta get in there!

Look at this, old school.

- [Town Resident] Brian, Shirley Beck.

- Hello, Shirley, pleased to meet you, Brian Keller.

- Nice to meet you.

- [Brian] You've got a beautiful store here.

You're doing a phenomenal job.

- Thank you, thank you.

- I think the brewery's on this corner over here.

I've gotta get in there!

(bright music) It's changed quite a bit, and it's changed for the better.

Lotta life, vitality, traffic, people.

- A lot of small towns in Montana are kind of standoff-ish and scary.

(laughing) I don't think I see that here.

I think you guys are really doin' the right thing.

- People have called this home, and they've taken pride in it, taken accountability of it, and embraced it and just adapted, and done very well.

And that's what attracts people to a town like Philipsburg.

Cheers to you.

Cheers to Philipsburg.

(bell ringing) - Hear ye, hear ye!

Let Philipsburg's 150th birthday party begin!

(crowd cheering and applauding) (upbeat music) - [Jim] One of the things, when we did our 150th, we had a plan of doing these before and after posters to show what renovation had happened.

And we estimated we'd have to do 15 or 18, I think it was.

We ended up doing three dozen.

Even those of us involved forgot how many places had been saved, changed, renovated.

And finally, a great friend of Philipsburg and living proof that you can be famous, and visit here and be treated like one of the family, former governor Brian Schweitzer.

(crowd cheering and applauding) - Mining towns all across America today look at each other and say, "We can't do any more.

"We'll close this shop down."

But in Philipsburg, it's the people.

It was the people who stayed and fought.

It was the people who stayed and said, "We can find more," the people who said, "We can do this."

It's the people who said, "We will bring candy to Main Street," when the people came for the candy.

They said, "We can make beer here again!"

Haven't made it for 100 years, and now we make the best beer in America in Philipsburg!

(audience cheering) We've got skiin', we've got candy, but we've got people.

It's been the heart of this place that has always driven Philipsburg, and it's the heart of the people that are here today that will continue to drive Philipsburg, no matter what the commodity is in the future.

- [Jim] You know, small town kids almost always wanna leave, and they should.

I mean, it's a big world out there.

But to me, the ultimate comeback story about Philipsburg is that for the first time in a generation, some of our young people born here are coming back to raise their families, and there's finally enough of an economy, a local economy, to sustain that.

And those, to me, are the ultimate comeback kids.

- This is Keith Antonioli.

He still looks the same.

- I'd like to say that I remember it, kind of, but I think it's only because I've seen the picture.

I wouldn't say I was hopeless when I graduated, that's not really how I felt, but I knew that I had to leave, you know?

There wasn't any way that I could stay here.

Not that it's impossible, but it's certainly not easy.

- When I was in high school, there was no young kids here.

Everybody left.

17 days after graduating high school, I got on a plane goin' to Chicago.

- 20 years ago, I didn't want to come back because there was nothing here, there were no opportunities.

And today, that's changed.

- I've been back for about seven years.

I've had my coffee shop now here in Philipsburg for five.

- You know, I was born and raised in Philipsburg.

I went to school in Missoula, and then after I had children, we moved back right away.

- Mom, she started the store, and it kept getting bigger and bigger, and she needed some help, so I came back to help her.

- There's a quote in this book, it's from my dad.

He says that he likes it here, and that he's gonna do whatever he can to stay here, as long as he can provide for his family.

And I think that Jess and I feel the same way about that.

We're gonna do whatever we can.

- My husband and I, we both decided that this is where we wanted to raise our family, and we wanted our kids to have what I had growing up.

- And I really wanted to stay here in this small town.

I know what it was like growing up here.

- I think everybody kind of enjoys raising their family when they know their neighbor.

- And they have it in their blood, Philipsburg, and you know, they see what Philipsburg's like, and then they come back and they do what they can to make it a better place.

- There were people that started years ago that are older now, and they have been putting years of work into this town to make it what it is now.

And I think bringing up a new generation that wants to volunteer, and just wants to be involved in the town is really important.

- I feel the same way.

You have to have the next generation step up.

- They set the precedence of what works, and stuff like that, and I think our generation is gonna kinda carry it.

They might add to it.

- What exactly is it that people come to Philipsburg to see?

- I don't know why it's so unique.

I've never been able to put my finger on it.

- It still has the small town feel.

- Its setting.

It's a fabulous work of Mother Nature's finest art.

When you see the mountains and the streams and the valleys, and the beautiful blue sky, then you see this little town set in that piece of canvas, you can understand why people don't want to leave when they get here.

- It's both the place and the people.

- What helped Philipsburg survive was the spirit of the community.

- The people.

- The people who have the vision.

- You know, the people that live here.

- Other places say, "How could we be like Philipsburg?"

- You can't be.

You know why?

'Cause we don't live in your town.

(laughing) - We had enough of these people with dreams that it made the town what it is today.

- And everyone saw the potential in this town, and everybody did their part.

- Everyone has their own passion, and they picked their own building, and they did what they wanted to do, and it all came together, and now, this is what we have.

- I have never found another place like Philipsburg.

- There's no place like this place.

- Come over the hill, and I look down the valley, and see the city of P-burg.

Oh, God, I was home, I was home and I loved it.

- To hear people talk about how great this town is, and I just take such a sense of pride.

That's my town!

That's mine.

- Absolutely.

You got a lot to be proud of.

- I do, I really do.

- Absolutely.

- We should be all proud of ourselves because we've done an awful lot.

- The happiest times of my life are here, and my fondest memories are here in this town.

- And I'm very proud of it, proud to be part of it.

- To come out of that bust, you know, and we're booming.

It's a great place to be, great place to live.

- If I had to call any place home, this would be it.

- There is a magic.

- It's something you really can't explain.

It's just a feeling.

- People remember if I was only there once, if only in my whole life, but there was this little town that I went to, and when I got done, I felt better at the end of the day than I've ever felt.

That's what happens in Philipsburg.

- I'm not a religious man, but something's workin'.

(laughing) Something's workin'.

(warm upbeat music) (bright tinkling) Saving the Burg is made possible with support from the Greater Montana Foundation encouraging communications on issues, trends and values of importance to Montanans.