New Podcast Episode: "Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams"
In the 1840s, Father De Smet planted the first apple trees in the Bitter Root Valley. By 1900, there were nearly 300,000 of them. The fruit born thereof would spawn an investment bubble that swelled to inordinate size.
It was almost precisely at the height of that bubble when the Bitter Root Valley Irrigation Company hired forty-two-year-old Frank Lloyd Wright to design certain projects in Montana.
Episode 5 of Distinctly Montana Stories follows Wright through his year of exhaustion in 1909: a year spent adding "tired to tired" while designing a utopian planned town that would rival Missoula, a sprawling resort complex, and a clubhouse for wealthy Chicago intellectuals seeking passive income from their rugged Montana getaways. It also follows him through a scandal that would make national headlines, a tragedy that would level his Wisconsin home and claim seven lives, and a return to Montana fifty years later to design a medical clinic in Whitefish with a seven-foot glowing plastic sphere emerging from its glass wall.
That clinic was demolished in 2018 after the owner gave preservationists until 5 PM to raise $1.7 million. The funds could not be raised in time.
By morning, one of Wright's final works was gone.
The episode is based on a story appearing in the Spring 2026 issue of Distinctly Montana, out this week.
Frank Lloyd Wright's Montana Dreams is available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, wherever you listen to podcasts, or using the embedded player below.
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