Plentywood

Travel Montana

Great Northern Development Corp., 2000

Plentywood Directory Listings

A view from 1939:

PLENTYWOOD, (2,024 alt., 1,226 pop.), seat.of Sheridan County, is said to have been named, before it was settled, by the foreman of a cattle outfit who found an unexpected hoard of wood on the bare prairie. No wood grows near here except small boxelder and poplar.

Plentywood is the capital of a grain-producing area whose development has been rapid and boisterous. It has experienced prosperity, drought and starvation, prosperity, and drought again.

The people here have been notably independent in politics. They began mildly enough, by supporting the Bull Moose ticket in 1912. In 1918 the Non-partisan League established the Producers News here, which under the editorship of Charles E. Taylor, helped to build up an organization that on several occasions attracted national attention. From 1920 to 1926 nearly the entire population of Sheridan County belonged to the Farmer-Labor Party; in 1922 and 1924 its ticket filled the county offices. The Producers News had a staff of editors, contributors, and collaborators that at one time included such people as Ella Reeve (Mother) Bloor and Tom O'Flaherty, brother of Liam O'Flaherty, the Irish author. Between heated political campaigns it found time to discuss contemporary cultural issues, and made Plentywood for several years one of the best-informed small towns in the Northwest; but it gathered its opposition as it went along. The Republicans and the Democrats consolidated their forces and in 1926 took advantage of the theft of $106,000 from the county treasurer's office to throw suspicion upon those in office. In the 1928 elections the Farmer-Labor ticket was defeated; conservatives have controlled the county since then. Nevertheless, the non-conformist minority has been active from time to time through the depression years. In 1930 about 500 citizens of the county voted the Communist Party ticket straight; in the winter of 1932-33 a group of militant malcontents took clothing by force from the Red Cross headquarters here. Partly because of such occurrences, Alfred Miller, an editor of the Producers News, was later arrested and threatened with deportation to Germany, his birthplace. In 1937, after the Producers News suspended publication, many of the former leaders left.

Source: Montana: A State Guide Book; Compiled and Written by the Federal Writers' Project of the Work Projects Administration for the State of Montana; September, 1939.