Frontier Gateway Museum – Historic Windmill

The historic windmill functions as signage for the Frontier Gateway Museum. An area farm family, which has community ties dating back to 1903, donated this windmill to the museum in the 1960s. The Frontier Gateway Museum houses various collections of artifacts and documents that once belonged to Montana pioneers, thus serving as a monument to Montana’s earliest homesteaders. The museum’s mission is “to do all in its power to collect and display all the available historical material pertaining to the history of Dawson County, Eastern Montana, and Western North and South Dakota.” The mission makes the preservation of the time-honored windmill absolutely vital.

Major wind events in Glendive damaged structures and equipment in the area, and the windmill needed repairs. The Frontier Gateway Museum used MHF funds to hire a windmill repair specialist, Bud Baker, to conduct these repairs. MHF is happy to help the Frontier Gateway Museum restore and stabilize this historic beacon, which has caught many eyes and helped draw in visitors from nearly every US state and eight different countries.