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Impression Book for Great Northern Railway [146152]

Currency:USD Category:Collectibles / Railroadiana, Trains Start Price:150.00 USD Estimated At:300.00 - 500.00 USD
Impression Book for Great Northern Railway  [146152]
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Bound volume, 9 x 12 inches, including ~300 pages of correspondence by agents of the Great Northern Railway in Vaughn, Montana, located a few miles west of Great Falls on the north side of the Sun River. It was the southern terminus of the narrow-gauge Great Falls & Canada Railway, which started in the north at Sweet Grass, Montana, on the US-Canada border to transport coal from the mines around Great Falls up to Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. It was purchased by the Great Northern Railway in 1904. The town that grew around the southern terminus was named Vaughn, after Robert Vaughn, who has established a large ranch in the area in 1869. He sold the ranch in 1890 to Thomas Couch, and it was Couch who platted and named the emerging town after Robert Vaughn. This provides some clue to the date of this document, since the correspondence is clearly labeled as originating in Vaughn, Montana, but the writer seldom included the year in the date line, and if so, only included a single digit. For example, the first page is datelined, "Vaughn, Mont, Aug 1st 3." Since the town was named in 1910 by Couch, would this date be 1913? The individually numbered pages are canary yellow, very thin onion-skin type paper on which the contents of handwritten and typewritten documents have been copied using some sort of spirit-duplication method. The pages have evidence of water damage, and those in the back of the book are stuck together. Careful conservation methods will be able to separate them. The contents document transactions of the railroad and are written by more than one named agents, most notably C. Parker in the early pages, and J.M. Atwood in later pages. Binding is broken but complete; the back of the book is water damaged with pages adhered together and some black staining. Probably worthy of conserving for the historic information of trade and transportation in Montana in its first decades of statehood.

Date: 1913
Country (if not USA):
State: Montana
City: Vaughn
Provenance: Stuart Mackenzie Montana Ephemera Collection