On your left is a simple one-story clapboard church, marked by pointed Gothic window heads and patterned diamond-and-fishscale shingles tucked into the gable ends.
This modest building carries one of Kalispell’s most intimate truths: people here often began before conditions were perfect. In the spring of eighteen ninety-five, Norwegian-Danish Methodists formed the town’s second Methodist congregation. The Kalispell Townsite Company gave them the lot, but the first building fund held only three hundred and fifty dollars, roughly thirteen thousand today. So the Scandinavian Methodist congregation-builders did not wait for wealth. They worshipped, planned, and built at once.
Robert Nordtome, a farmer and skilled carpenter, became the lead builder and informal architect. Lars Johnson, who had recently contracted Central School, also lent his hands. Much of the labour happened in spare hours, after ordinary work was done. More touching still, the congregation held regular services and Sunday school here before construction had even finished. Faith came first; completion followed later.
Let your eyes rest on those upward-pointing details, the Late Gothic Revival shapes borrowed from older European churches, and imagine members stepping inside while sawdust still lingered and walls were still being finished.
If Reverend George McVey Fisher helped spread Kalispell’s earliest religious network, this church gave that network a distinctly Scandinavian voice. It was one of only four churches in Montana built by the Norwegian-Danish Conference, and it kept worship services in the congregation’s original Scandinavian languages longer than the others, until nineteen thirty-nine. When the conference merged that year, the congregation became Westside Methodist Church and shifted to English, neatly tracing the town’s passage from immigrant enclave to settled community.
This building even served as temporary classrooms while West Side School rose nearby. Later, after the Methodists left in nineteen fifty-seven, the Salvation Army turned it into a thrift shop. Since nineteen eighty-nine, it has continued in that practical, generous afterlife. If you peek at the image in the app, you can see that plain endurance for yourself. When you’re ready, we’ll continue to the Bader-Jaquette and Westwang Houses and Rental Property, about two minutes away, where work, home, and ambition meet under one roof.
