Three generations of Jefferson County ranchers touched on the heart and soul of their community at last week’s Community Heart & Soul Story Spotlight Night in Boulder.
Nearly 40 people gathered Feb. 25 in the St. Catherine Church pastoral center to hear Helen Carey, 86, Brady Minow-Smith, 41, and Maylea Dawson, 17, speak about ranch life, their hopes for the future, and the bond between ranching and the town they call home.
“There’s a really great sort of symbiotic relationship between the ranching community and the town of Boulder in that both sort of help each other thrive,” Minow-Smith said during the Monitor-moderated event.
Community Heart & Soul, a nonprofit development program, aims to leverage greater engagement and storytelling to guide rural revitalization. The project’s essay contest, which ended March 2, received four submissions. Contest winners, to be announced later this week, will receive gift cards from local businesses ranging from $25 to $ 75.
Boulder Heart & Soul has also gathered nearly 180 resident stories, according to Rochelle Hesford, who is leading the effort and viewed last week’s event as a success.
“I had a few people come up to me and offer suggestions for other people to interview, and then also to offer to volunteer,” she said. “That was definitely one of the goals, because we need to keep moving and adding more volunteers to maintain the impact of what we’re doing.”
Over two hours, the three women spoke in detail about their lives and what they most value about their home. Despite the decades separating them, each emphasized Boulder’s unconditional support and the ranching community as essential to the town’s character.
Of the three speakers, only Carey was born outside the county, but her years at the head of the Carey ranching clan have made her a local touchstone. Originally from North Dakota, Carey attended Carroll College before moving to Boulder to teach music at the Montana Development Center. Arriving via the now-defunct train line, she had to walk four miles to Boulder on dirt roads in three-inch heels and nylon stockings, having never lived in a place without taxis.
After marrying third-generation Boulder Valley rancher Tom Carey, she left her high heels and stockings behind and became the family matriarch, raising their 8 kids on hard work and rodeo. She often volunteered to do the calving season work that the men “were too squeamish” to do.
“At first I thought, I don’t know about a little town, everybody’s going to know my business,” admitted Carey. “After I’d been here a while, I thought, what a blessing, because people knew if things were bad, if you had things going on. If everything was going well for you, they were happy.”
Knowing and being known is now central to Carey’s identity and that of her family. She said she’s delighted with continuing signs of growth in town, like the expanding high school and the new programs at the library, but she worries that the town may become a bedroom community as younger families move in and tend to commute to Helena for work.
She said her sense of community was defined by the fact that “she knew a lot of people” and worried that if people moved most of their day-to-day lives to the city, that sense of care and familiarity in the town would diminish. Boulder’s identity, it seems, comes from not only knowing your neighbor but caring for them, too.
It was this sense of unparalleled care that motivated Minow-Smith to move back to Boulder from Louisiana after the birth of her son. Minow-Smith has lived across the country and spent time in the Peace Corps in Ghana, Africa, but it’s the tight-knit relationships of home that she wanted her son to grow up with.
“This whole room here helped raise me,” Minow-Smith said, gesturing out to the crowd. “From babysitting me, to teaching me, to running businesses that I hung out at, or going to church, the community raises the children.”
She wanted her son to have the same sense of care and safety she had growing up. If one family was having a branding, they could rely on their neighbors to come help out, and vice versa.
This kind of support wasn’t unique to the ranching community, though perhaps it was more pronounced. “Even if you’re not on a ranch, there’s a good chance that you’re going to be helping out on a ranch at some point,” said Minow-Smith.
She offered two recommendations: one, that Boulder resist the proposed women’s prison, and two, to be careful not to let familiarity become stifling, especially for young kids. “Once someone’s labeled a bad kid, it’s really hard for them to break away from that,” Minow-Smith said. “Similarly, if you’re labeled a good kid, you can get away with anything.”
However, she also said she’d seen kids at the high school expand their horizons in unique ways because the small school meant most were involved with the arts and sports. Even today, Jefferson High School students can be basketball stars and take lead roles in school theater.
Dawson knows this firsthand. The Jefferson High junior plays multiple sports and is president of the local 4-H club, the Boulder Outlaws. Once again, the unwavering support of her community is what inspired Dawson to get involved with 4-H and run for president.
She’s been involved with the group since she was 6 years old, watching it go from struggling to attract enough members to now considering capping membership. Her work in 4-H, Dawson said, keeps her connected to Boulder and other ranching families.
Dawson said she’s always impressed by how the community turns out for 4-H events, whether it’s giving an additional donation when paying for parking at skijoring or buying Christmas trees, even though so many people could find good trees in their backyards.
“That is what’s made me feel like I’m a part of this community,” Dawson said. “My joining the 4-H club doing community service is my way of giving back to the community that’s helped me so much in so many ways.”
Dawson takes great pride in her work and thinks there’s a good chance she’ll return to ranching after college, where she intends to study something in the realm of agriculture. She hopes to study somewhere unfamiliar. “I think that’s natural to not have anyone in the same place and kind of meet new people, see new things, but I would be interested in coming back,” she said.
Outside of her official duties, she continues the tradition of offering a helping hand to her fellow ranchers. “I’m always reaching out to people and being like, ‘Hey, if you need help riding, let me know. I’d love to help.’ And so there’s kind of a sense of where people contact being like, ‘Hey, are you free? We might need an extra hand’,” Dawson said.
In Boulder, community seems to mean going to the next ranch over to help with branding, buying a Christmas tree from the 4-H club when you could cut one down in your yard, and always being someone your neighbor can rely on.
It’s up to Community Heart & Soul, and the people of Boulder, to cherish and maintain this connecting trait into a potentially unpredictable future.
