I became a historian because of my father. He told stories, many centered on struggles like those of his grandfather’s early twentieth-century homesteading in the Sweetgrass Hills region or of his own bitter Lewistown youth in the Great Depression. His tales tied his and his family’s histories to Montana places, embedding the landscape with personal meaning and a sense of the past.

I became an architectural historian because of my mother. An artist, she understood how “home,” the deeply-felt symbol, is embedded in “house,” the physical structure. In the early 1970s, she knew she had found the right home for our family when we moved to our beloved 1898 house in Pony. Now Pony is all these things to me: family, memory, history, and home, all bound up in buildings and landscape.

Janet Ore