If you’re ever taking the time to wander the mainest of main drag in the sleepy town of Deer Lodge, Montana, and you’re looking for another (not so) quick thing to occupy your juniors, it would seem that fate has taken the time to smile all over you, whatever it that means. In addition to the Prison Museum, Car Museum, and everything else they have going for them, there is also the (im)modest suburb of Cottonwood City. It’s so perfect you’d almost suspect it was built only recently by volunteers to appease junior folk such as us.
If that’s your suspicion, it’s a correct one.
Cottonwood City isn’t a true suburb, in that it would have to have its own governing body, roads, residents or any number of other things necessary to really be a different city (including a distance from the real city of greater than four-inches.)
Still, it holds its own, and for what it is, we dug it like a bowl of Honey Smacks, if they still sell that cereal and the Daddy-Man’s suggestion isn’t somehow anecdotally out of date by a solid pair of decades, as it all too often is.
Cottonwood City is a frontier town complete with a handful of fun little buildings, some replica, some authentic, set up to entertain and educate any visitor willing to take the minutes to get themselves acquainted. Fun stuff a’ plenty to romp all about, as well as placards at every turn to explain them; or so I’m told, I didn’t actually bother to read any of them.
Then again, I can’t yet read, but I’ve heard good things about it. That whole “reading” thing sounds pretty interesting, and I’ll get right on it as soon as it seems relevant.
(I’d normally make a political joke right here, but last time I did I got ripped to bits by an overseas serviceman, as if those of us fighting the good fight on the domestic front aren’t actually doing as much to keep him safe as his very own rifle is, but I’ll refrain regardless.)
Cottonwood City is within the Deer Lodge Prison Museum Complex, which is to say that it’s just across the street, on the same main drag as the killer Auto and Prison museums, so your parking will work just as well. If you’re out of budget to see the museums (which you shouldn’t be, they’re affordable, and especially so when you consider how much they have inside them) you can always spend any amount of times limited or un at the adjacent double-lot recreation called Cottonwood City.
Were it not for our impending sunburns and the waning of parental patience, we’d have stayed there hours longer. Sadly, it was just not to be.
Visit them online right here, if you like, or just stop by and check out what all the fuss is about. Trust me when I tell you we put down the fuss, and it was worth it.
