Montana's roadside historical markers began in 1935, when Bob Fletcher of the State Highway Commission wrote the first of them, and the program the Montana Department of Transportation runs today has kept writing new ones and rewriting old ones ever since: historical markers, geologic markers, and markers on the histories of Montana's Native nations. Two hundred and thirty of them now have permanent pages at TreeAlive, each carrying the Department's current text on georeferenced maps from the eras it describes, and each pinned where the Department's own inventory places the sign. Texts the Department has written for markers not yet installed are not shown.
230Marker pages
82,000+Historical map sheets
Montana Department of Transportation, Montana's Historical Highway MarkersCredited on every page
Every dot is a live page. Click one to preview it or add it to a road trip; many dots hold several markers each; click a busy spot to zoom in. Prefer a list? Browse all 230 markers by county.
TreeAlive maps family trees. When a visitor's ancestors lived in Montana, the markers standing near those places surface automatically alongside their family's journey:
Pompey’s Pillar · near where a family homesteaded on the Yellowstone · Captain Wm. Clark stopped here July 25, 1806 and carved a signature that is still there
When a marker stands near a place in your own tree, you have a personal reason to go see it. Open the live demo tree, choose the Crossings tab, and turn on Historical Markers to see the experience working (the demo family’s markers are in Pennsylvania; a Montana family sees Montana’s).
Browsing all 230 markers by county.
Scan: the Pompey’s Pillar marker page