Livingston Depot Center

Summer 2011 Exhibits

The Livingston Depot Center's 2011 museum season will run from Saturday, May 28 through approximately September 05, 2010 (dates are slightly different each year.) We're open Monday-Saturday 9-5 and Sunday 1-5. Admission is very modest ($0 for adults, $0 for kids and seniors 62+) -- and free to members. Our special featured exhibit this year is...

Making its debut appearance in 2011 is “Six Shooters of the American West.” The exhibit will feature the photography of six of the premier photographers “shooters” of the American West. The Livingston Depot Foundation has selected Allen Russell, to be guest curator for this special exhibition and he is also one of the six photographers. Allen Russell, from Livingston MT, specializes in photographing “Life in the American West” and he has brought together a notable group that he has met while extensively traveling and shooting the West. “Because the American West offers such a vast array of iconic subjects, many photographers from around the World come here to attempt to capture its visual offerings,” Russell states. “But those I sought out for ‘Six Shooters of the American West’ all make the West their full time home and know its locations, people and animals intimately” he continued. As you walk through the grand venue provided by the Livingston Depot, amid the images, you begin to become aware that The American West is “much more than just a place, it’s a feeling, an attitude, a mood, a way of being,” noted Russell.

The Shooters are Barbara Van Cleve, Diana Volk, Jim Bechtel, Thomas Lee, Will Brewster and Allen Russell.

Following The Lead Mare

Allen Russell, Photographer, Livingston

Leader of a Nation

Diana Volk, Photogragher, Sheridan, WY

Tatanka

Jim Bechtel, Photographer, Emigrant

Feeding The Old Way

Barbara Van Cleve, Photographer, Big Timber

Wade's Drive-In, Harlowton

Thomas Lee, Photographer, Bozeman

Man In Tipi

Will Brewster, Photographer, Belgrade

* 2010 Special Traveling Exhibition "Sweat & Steel" will be traveling to Montana museums through 2012
Railroad workers paintings by Livingston artist,

David Swanson

Rails Across the Rockies: A Century of People and Places

Railroads played a critical role in the growth of the American West and modern Montana. Three of the five transcontinental railroads ran through this state. Rails across the Rockies is our primary museum exhibit, telling the story of regional railroad history in a variety of sub-exhibits. For most of its first century, the U.S. was a society hugging the Atlantic Coast and spreading tentatively west of the Appalachians, but after the Civil War, interest in the sparsely populated West grew as railroads, the newest technology in transportation, inched toward the Pacific. In 1869, the first transcontinental railroad crossed the nation through its center, and the journey from East to West became a relatively safe and comfortable trip of a few days instead of the once arduous cross-country horse trek or lengthy voyage around South America.

olddepot.jpg (32371 bytes)

Now the race was on to tie the rest of the remote West to the centers of population. In 1883, the Northern Pacific Railroad connected its eastern and western divisions, west of Livingston, forever binding Montana to the population centers in the Midwest and on the west coast. Between 1883 and 1909, two more transcontinental rail links crossed Montana. The railroads needed to fill both their passenger and freight trains and thus came to place a high priority on convincing settlers to move west, as well as on finding and promoting tourist destinations. Livingston was a key center for the Northern Pacific, both because it lay midway between the NP's endpoints at Seattle and St. Paul and because it was the first railroad gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Livingston also sat at the beginning of the Rocky Mountain passes the NP's workers had paid so dearly to cross.

Once the railroad entered the mountains, the problem of steep grades, tunnels, and snowbound passes replaced the relative ease of crossing the Great Plains, both in construction and in operations. As you pass through these exhibits, you can begin to appreciate the extraordinary people who by skill, brawn, and often sheer will power created one of the greatest engineering feats in human history, -- the rails across the Rockies.