Group forms to help Beaver Creek Park

Courtesy photo

The entrance to Camp Kiwanis leads to the offices of Beaver Creek Park as well as cabins, the Camp Kiwanis Lodge, the newly renovated historic chapel and other facilities.

A meeting is slated for Tuesday to help create a group to help one of Hill County's main attractions.

Dana Pyette, assistant to the superintendent of Beaver Creek Park, said the first meeting of Friends of Beaver Creek Park, scheduled for 7 p. m. in the Havre High School Auditorium, will help set the focus of the group and what it can do to help with and improve the park.

"We are encouraging the public to attend and be a part of creating this new organization, " Pyette said. "We are looking for board directors, members, volunteers, financial support — and thoughts, concerns and ideas. "

She said the main purpose of creating the organization — which will be a private group, independent of the county park board but intended to help it with its projects — is to raise funds for projects at and the operation of Beaver Creek.

"(It is) to preserve the park and help the park board with … ideas for Beaver Creek Park, " Pyette said.

She said when she started working as the assistant to Superintendent Chad Edgar, she soon saw that the county was unable to fund everything that was needed "to make the park everything it can be. "

She said she started brainstorming with Robbie Lucke, a member of the Hill County Park Board and a long-time advocate for and user of Beaver Creek.

"We just decided to get a group together, " Pyette said.

The park has a long history in the area. Originally, the area was designated as part of the military reservation of Fort Assinniboine, established in 1879.

The reservation originally stretched from the the Milk River from its confluence with Bullhook Creek to the Missouri River, with its western border from the confluence of Big Sandy Creek and the Milk to the Missouri.

The area now Beaver Creek Park was used as a recreation area by soldiers and employees at the fort and their families.

The fort was decommissioned in 1911.

In 1916, after decades of people advocating for the creation of a reservation for the band of Chippewa Indians led by Chief Rocky Boy, or Stone Child, and the Cree band led by Chief Little Bear, the U. S. Congress passed a law creating Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation out of much of the former Fort Assinniboine military reserve.

That same law set more than 10,000 acres, a strip a mile wide and 17-miles long, as a recreation area to be maintained by the city of Havre.

In the 1940s, when the city could no longer afford to maintain the park, the Hill County Commission proposed a bond, passed by the voters in 1947, to fund purchasing the land, and it became a county park.

Today, the park is a center of recreation, with numerous cabins — some dating before it was taken over by the county — and campsites, with many maintained by groups from the Havre area like the Rotary Club, Lions Club, Railroad Pagers, Kiwanis Club, and the cabins, lodge and other facilities including the park office at Camp Kiwanis busy throughout the season.

The chapel at Camp Kiwanis has been listed on the national registry of historic places and work has been done over the last few years to restore that site.

While the county does have funding sources for the operation of the park aside from tax levies — grazing leases offered to ranchers, funds raised through cabin leases and campsite rentals, and the board is in the process of creating a Beaver Creek Park specialty license plate — Pyette said she hopes the Friends of Beaver Creek Park will be able to find more revenue to make the park even better.

Tuesday's meeting will help set the tone for what the Friends of Beaver Creek Park group will be doing to help preserve that history, and set the tone for the future. Pyette said that the idea is to bring together community members to work on that project. Along with drafting and approving bylaws and electing a board of directors, anyone interested in helping is invited to come and share their ideas.