Walking….talking…learning.
They are the Hoof-It with a Historian Walking Tours, what the Western Heritage Center calls an opportunity to ground Billings residents in their community.
“We can connect sites…stories to specific sites,” said Lauren Hunley, WHC’s Community Historian. “You are standing in the place where this happened. This building you drive by every day has this incredible component to it that really helps to define us a community. Now you get to understand where you live, why its important, to really help to build that community identity. “
On this Friday, Hunley bringing Minnesota Avenue and Billings’the south side to life.
“We had the red light district here. As you saw on the map this area here was our China Town, our community for immigrants from Asia. Where RiverStone Health is today is the central location of our Black community,” Hunley explained to the tour groups.
By the early 20th century these communities were gone.
“Unfortunately none of those communities really continued to exist in Billings. The hardships of the early 19-teens and 1920s really pushed all of them out,” said Hunley.
The tour group walked along a row of boarded up buildings that once housed bars and restaurants that fed the city coffers, an economy lesson that Billings resident Connie Kvilhaug found interesting..
“The economy that was Billings in those days was basically from bars and brothels. It just… I guess the different nationalities coming together where a lot of those people were the ones bringing in the money and yet it was still kind of hush hush,” commented Connie Kvilhaug.
For Connie’s daughter Katie, it was that very few of those buildings that had a place in Billings history no longer remain.
“I honestly didn’t know so much of it that had been torn down. I would have expected more of the buildings to have been renovated or kept in place. It’s kind of sad to see a lot of that is gone. Without this tour nobody would ever know,” said Katie Kvilhaug.
The Friday tours continue through the end of August including Celebrities & Scandals in Downtown Billings, Homes by Cogagen, and a repeat of this Bars, Brothels and Bok Choy tour.
For more information available online at Western Heritage Center website .
