100 Years of the Merc

Visitors who brave the dusty stretch of Montana 486, known simply as the North Fork Road, are rewarded with striking views of the park and an array of baked goodies – huckleberry bear claws, cinnamon rolls, macaroons, microbrew, coffee, fresh-baked bread and pocket sandwiches – while the shelves of the Merc are lined with practical wares like gauze and parachute cord, power steering fluid and Spam, making it a one-stop resupply shop.

It is a place steeped in a history older than the name “Polebridge,” and the Merc’s “General Mercantile Historic District” is listed in the National Register of Historic Places.

William L. “Bill” Adair built the Merc back in 1914, just four years after Glacier Park became a park. He fished, using only one fly (the Coachman), and drank and grew king-sized cabbages while his wife (and later, after she died, a second wife) ran the store and lived in their homestead cabin, which is now the Northern Lights Saloon.

He planted the only elm tree in the North Fork, which still shades patrons of the neighboring saloon, and his transplanted hop vines continue to creep up the saloon wall.

The Merc’s interior still bears the log walls that Adair hand-hewed with a broadax so he could adorn them with wallpaper, and the old glass-cylinder gas pump, which used a pump-and-gravity system to fuel vehicles, remains on the complex.

The Mercantile was originally known as Adair’s, while Polebridge was the store and post office a half-mile north, toward the Glacier National Park entrance.

That second store was owned and operated by another homesteader, Ben Hensen Sr., who opened his store in the 1920s because he thought Adair’s prices were exorbitant. When Hensen was awarded the post office contract, his wife May submitted the name Polebridge, which was accepted.

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