A Short History of the Bon Ton Mill, Our Home on the Northside

People ask us about the building all the time. The Bon Ton Mill is one of those Bozeman places you notice: four stories of brick on the corner of North Wallace and East Peach, with an old flour sack painted across the east face. We're proud to work inside it, so we went and learned its story.

A baker's mill

Eugene Graf Sr. was a baker from Germany. He built the mill in 1930 to supply his bakery downtown at the corner of Main Street and Willson Avenue, and that corner still carries the old bakery sign. The mill itself opened in 1932.

Graf milled white, wheat, and graham flour, and he built a reputation for unbleached flour with a high protein content, sold under the name Bontana. Grain moved from floor to floor as it was ground, sifted, and cleaned into the finished product. Some of the machinery was secondhand, brought in from a mill that had failed over in Miles City, and the grain bins came from a malting company in Manhattan, Montana. At its peak in the 1930s, the mill and bakery together employed around twenty people, which was real work in Bozeman at the time.

From flour to feed

Graf's son, Eugene Jr., took over in the late 1940s. He eventually shut down flour production, most likely because he didn't want to go head to head with the big national bread companies that were taking over by then, and added a feed mill on the southwest end of the building. The feed mill ran from 1966 to 1980 and burned down in the early eighties.

After that, the building went quiet for a long stretch. For years it belonged to pigeons, the occasional drifter, and high school kids looking for somewhere to get into trouble.

Brought back to life

The Graf family sold the property to Don and Susan Turner in the mid-1980s, and the Turners renovated it. Later the Hritsco family bought the building, drawn to the northeast neighborhood, and turned it into offices. There's a nice footnote there: the Hritscos have their own Bon Ton connection, since the parents met while working at a Bon Ton bakery in Missoula. These days the place has a waiting list for tenants.

What's still here

Most of the mill's past hides in plain sight. The grain elevator is gone, but its shaft got built right into the office spaces, so you'd never know unless someone told you. Flour dust still clings to the bottom of the old elevator space, and some of the milling equipment is up in the attic. The silos at the edge of the lot are used for storage now. And the flour sack painting on the east wall, repainted over the years, is staying put.

And now, a barbershop

We like being part of that chain. A building that started as one craftsman's workshop, a baker grinding his own flour, is a fitting home for another trade built on patience and good tools. If you want to see it for yourself, come book a chair and have a look around.

One last thing: nobody seems to know for certain why Graf called it the Bon Ton. "Bon" means good. His granddaughter figures that's the reason, or maybe it was something he picked up in Europe. Good enough for us.

Further reading: the Bozeman Daily Chronicle's history of the building and the Extreme History Project.