When I was a teenager, I would roam the hills west of Jefferson City on four wheeler and foot. It was largely undeveloped country worth exploring – open and with prospects unknown. I now live on one of those very hills, on land carved up and subdivided only a decade ago. The homes in our neighborhoods are hopefully places of security, family, and love, but when you see a good hillside go from grass and elk to a pile of addresses , there’s paradox there, partly because I’m a part of it, and partly because in some way subdivisions are graveyards – every home being a sort of tombstone for a chunk of undeveloped earth now gone.
If you’ve lived here for any amount of time, you’ve seen a fair amount of change in Jefferson County. I think it is interesting to see how different communities change differently. The majority of people living north of Boulder Hill, at least in part, live in Bedroom Communities, which are suburbs inhabited largely by people who commute to a nearby city for work – that city being Helena. Other parts of the county, from the northern Boulder Valley, to the hills west of Whitehall, have also seen their share of change.
The maps included with this feature show the change. They show the structures of Boulder and Montana City and when they were built. It’s an imperfect dataset, and keep in mind structures could mean homes, barns, businesses, and more. It’s not catching all the structures of our county, as some do not have addresses, and some no longer exist, but it’s a telling representation of the differences of places, and how they’ve changed over time.
Jefferson County has been around since 1865. We’ve had slow decades of growth, and recently, fast ones. Of the 13,500-ish structures with addresses in Jefferson County, 60% have been built since 1990. That’s kind of interesting, because though the majority of the structures in our county have been built since 1990, our population has only increased around 35% in that same period of time. Folks these days like to build.
Jefferson County, much like Montana, is a dynamic place. On one hand we have places like Elk Park, that looks much the same as it did 100 years ago, sans an interstate. While on the other we have Montana City, the vast majority of which has been built in the last 30 years, and no doubt skews our county to hold the title of highest median household income in the state of Montana.
How is the identity of our county changing, and what will it be moving forward? Norman Maclean once wrote, “The problem of self-identity is not just a problem for the young. It is a problem all the time. Perhaps the problem. It should haunt old age, and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead.” Jefferson County is one of Montana’s nine original counties. By Montana’s standards, we are old. But we are far from dead.
