Northern Montana College Girls Residence Hall, Listed!

Designed by architect Frank Bossuot, the Collegiate Gothic Northern Montana College Girls Residence Hall’s construction in Havre marked the college’s serious intent to provide quality higher education to Montana’s northern tier students.

The presence of Northern Montana College had a profound impact on the education of those northern and eastern Montana high school graduates who, after decades of little choice, now had the option to attend a school of higher education on the Hi-Line. The college and the Girls Residence Hall allowed an affordable and accessible option for residents of this sparsely populated area of Montana. Completed in 1936, the Girls Residence Hall was the first truly new building built on the Northern Montana College campus. The design and size of the building allowed a variety of uses that allowed the building to serve as the heart of the campus.

HILL COUNTY, Northern Montana College Girls Residence Hall, 300 West 11th Street, Havre, SG100010160, LISTED, 4/4/2024

Northern Montana College Girls Residence Hall

The history of Havre’s Northern Montana College is the story of Hi-Line residents’ persistence in establishing a place of higher education. When NMC opened its Girls Residence Hall in 1936, it marked the college’s commitment to its current and future women students by providing them an affordable, safe, and accessible place to live.

Architect Frank Bossuot’s design for the dorm in Collegiate-Gothic architectural style creates an atmosphere of respected antiquity equaling the scale and architecture of buildings on Montana’s other college campuses.

Such a state-of-the-art dorm would not have been possible during the Great Depression without a federal Public Works Administration grant. The grant achieved the PWA program’s ideals by stimulating the local economy through construction, bolstering NMC’s enrollment, and adding women graduates to Montana’s workforce.