Jefferson County is just over a million acres in size. It sounds like a lot, but as far as the 56 counties of Montana go, that puts us at 43rd in terms of area. If you were to randomly pluck any acre of our county, I’d wager the chief attribute of that chunk of earth and your relationship with it would be its ownership. Land in Montana is broken into parcels – distinct, legally defined, and separated from others – the fundamental units of real estate. There are 13,245 in our county, according to the state Department of Revenue.
Our county is mostly public lands, overseen by the United States Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM). Belonging as much to the residents of Jefferson County as to the richest American in New York state and the poorest in Florida, they’re an anchor to the soul of our culture here.
As far as individual owners go, the USFS is Jefferson County’s largest land owner. In the late 1800s these lands were part of the Forest Reserves, and in 1905 Theodore Roosevelt transferred them to the newly created Forest Service. Typically, Forest Service ground is the higher stuff – the Elkhorns, the Boulder Mountains. An interesting feature one can see on the map of the Bull Mountains is checkerboard ownership – the result of yesteryear’s railroad land grants to incentivize development in the West.
