MILDRED

Mildred is on O'Fallon Creek 20 miles southeast of Terry. The station was named for a daughter of a Milwaukee Railroad official. Mildred was a thriving little town on the Old Yellowstone Trail with many tourists traveling through. The town hall was the scene of wrestling matches, basketball games, spelling bees, and dances. A cyclone carried away most of the building but left the piano unharmed and sheet music still in place on it. Children from the Lacomb and Whitney areas came to school by train each day. When the highway was changed, the town lost population. During the drought years, the country folk left and business places had to close. (from Cheney's Names on the Face of Montana, Mountain Press Publishing Company) Not far from Mildred you can get on the Big Sky Byway in Terry. In eastern Montana this travel route links the two major rivers in the state, the Yellowstone and the Missouri. This route follows a section of the historic Regina-Yellowstone (R-Y) Trail, which tourists from Canada used to reach Yellowstone National Park. The north-south orientation of the trail will give you a glimpse of dry land farming, rolling prairie grassland, scenic scoria buttes, and badlands terrain. While in Terry visit the Prairie County Museum and Evelyn Cameron Gallery. The museum exhibits capture the essence of the old pioneer life, the way it was lived, how it was endured, and how pioneers thrived in eastern Montana. The Cameron Gallery located beside the Prairie County Museum is home to many of the pictorial works of Lady Evelyn Cameron, an Englishwoman who homesteaded in Prairie County in 1889. Lady Cameron took stark and dramatic photos of everyday life on the prairie.