The Manlove Homestead, East Helena’s oldest structure, needs to be moved — but no one can decide where.
The Manlove Homestead, a 20-by-16-foot log cabin, was built by Jonathan and Elmira Manlove in 1864 after they parted from an Iowa wagon train through the Oregon Trail. What started as a rest and repair stop became a permanent settlement, digging some of the first potato fields in the Helena area.
It’s barely beaten by Pioneer Cabin on South Park Avenue in Helena for the oldest cabin in the county, instead taking the crown of oldest in East Helena.
But even after being moved by the East Helena Kiwanis Club years ago, the Manlove cabin is still on the move. Its current location on Montana Secondary Highway Route 518 near U.S. 287 is at risk due to nearby construction.
The Montana Environmental Trust Group secured the $38,000 needed to move the cabin and plenty of volunteers are ready to help with the labor, but no property owners seem to be biting, East Helena Historical Society President Marty Folio said.
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“These things are important,” Folio said. “But no one seems to want the liability.”
The historic Manlove cabin in East Helena
To Folio, “liability” seems to be code for “not wanting to deal with it.”
So far, the East Helena City Council has voted against moving the cabin to its parking lot, where a preserved train depot has already been placed.
“We would all like to see the cabin cared for and kept nearby,” Councilman Wes Feist said in an email, “however, the City of East Helena does not have discretion over the property.”
Council members listed ideas for where the cabin could go instead at a May meeting, and in the last month, Folio and the historical society have hunted elsewhere.
They may place it on a cemetery, rodeo grounds, an empty lot near U.S. Highway 12 or even inside the upcoming history museum, but no one option has shown much promise.
From left, Preserve Montana Restoration Director Mary Webb, Lewis and Clark County Heritage Preservation Officer Pam Attardo and East Helena volunteers help to restore the East Helena railway depot on Aug. 10, 2021. The more than 100-year-old building now sits in the city hall parking lot off Main Street and will eventually be converted into a museum.
These things can take years, Pam Attardo with the Lewis and Clark County Heritage Tourism Council said. As someone who’s personally worked with moving historic sites, she knows the back-and-forth of who-does-what can rarely be rushed.
They’re also often done by word and can have flimsy paper trails, she said.
Bureaucracy slows down an already slow process, but it means people directly involved in the conversations are usually the only ones fully in the know until an official application is written.
That was the case for the Manlove cabin, Folio said.
Former East Helena Historical Society President Rick Pyfer, who died in December 2023, led the conversation for its move at least eight months before his death. Folio suspected he’d been surveying the problem months before even then.
“We’re doing our best to pick up where he left off,” Folio said. “But this was Rick’s project.”
Although the official deadline of June 1 for the cabin’s move has passed, Folio said he’s prepared to defend its place until it finds a home.
The cabin has no special protections as a historic site, Attardo said, nor does East Helena have anti-demolition rules that would majorly protect the cabin.
Because it left its original placement and has been in its most recent home less than 50 years, the city of East Helena could choose to flatten it without much issue.
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