(train whistling) - [Narrator] In 1889, 24 years after the Civil War, the Transcontinental Railroad had opened the West to the economic growth of the Gilded Age.

Western artist Charlie Russell turned 25, and Benjamin Harrison swore an oath as America's 23rd president.

That year, Montana became the 41st state.

Its mines produced a quarter of the silver in the United States, and its ranchers shipped trainloads of cattle to Chicago.

Mark Twain had just published "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court".

The New York Giants defeated the Brooklyn Bridegrooms in Baseball's Championship, and a racehorse named Spokane, raised near Twin Bridges, Montana, won the Kentucky Derby.

Germany produced a gasoline-powered vehicle that traveled at 10 miles an hour.

It was on display at the Paris Exposition, where crowds flocked to see a new architectural wonder.

The Eiffel Tower rose more than 1,000 feet above the city, giving Paris a modern visual identity.

Also in 1889, an American began to forge a visual identity for the inland Northwest.

AJ Gibson would design buildings to shatter the notion of log cabins as the height of western architecture.

In all, about 90 of his designs would bring a sense of civilization to western Montana and northern Idaho, but one building would also lead to his humiliation and retirement and to a second act as an automobile pioneer.

(upbeat music) Many of the drawings and plans for AJ Gibson's buildings are held in the archives of the Mansfield Library at the University of Montana.

That's where art history professor Rafael Chacon studied the nearly 150 designs to write a book about Gibson.

But without a little luck and the help of Missoula architect Jim McDonald, Chacon might not have had the drawings to work with.

- [Jim] This shows the foundation underneath, and then the wall here with the sandstone face to it.

- [Narrator] In the 1960s, the last member of Gibson's original architectural firm retired and all of Gibson's drawings ended up in the trash.

Another architect rescued them before they made it to the landfill, and later, McDonald and others photographed and copied the drawings.

- It was really important, because they were so valuable and they needed to be preserved drawings.

- [Rafael] I think this one's interesting because it's a cross section.

That's a pretty rare thing at this point.

- [Narrator] Those drawings helped Chacon write "The Original Man", which explores how Gibson's designs reflected the sensibilities of the people and the place.

- Architecture is a sign, a manifestation of how a community sees itself.

So Gibson was building buildings that responded to the needs of this community that saw itself as a lot more important than it was a generation earlier.

- Yeah, it was very important to get its own identity of, you know, a real commercial vibrant area that made Missoula what it was.

And the buildings helped a lot.

A little more detail in this that really starts to bring out that Queen Anne style.

- We don't need any more log cabins.

We need stone and brick buildings, right?

We need beautiful buildings.

We need buildings that are symbolic of the place that we now exist in.

- [Narrator] Chacon says Gibson's designs helped change the character of the state by changing its physical landscapes.

- Clearly, the signature and everything on it tells us this is the young architect, or would-be architect putting his ideas down on paper.

- [Narrator] That would-be architect was born Albert John Gibson in Ashland County, Ohio in 1862.

- The earliest biographies we have of AJ Gibson described him as a pretty precocious kid.

And of course, he had a limited education, probably no more than sixth grade.

- [Narrator] As a teenager, he impressed the neighbors by building a hand-cut barn for his family.

- And apparently he worked with solid woodworkers and solid carpenters, and that's how he learned to do it.

- [Narrator] Gibson's father William died during an encephalitis epidemic in 1883, and at 21, Gibson decided it was the right time to make a move.

- He went west, obviously pursuing the dream that I think a lot of young men in America had in the late 19th century, which was, you know, part of this Manifest Destiny, to find their destiny in the American West.

- [Narrator] He chose the bustling mining city of Butte, Montana as his destination.

- [Rafael] Butte was, of course, a logical place to go because it was a boom town and it was a great city, you know, it was a populous city.

A lot of people were going there.

- [Narrator] Those people needed places to live.

And Gibson learned the business of building and designing homes as an apprentice.

It was essential training.

But Butte would provide an even more important element to his future success.

- [Narrator] Meeting Maud Lockley would change his life forever, because in Maud, he found a mate, he found a spouse, and he found a devoted supporter.

- [Narrator] Maud was the daughter of Frederick Lockley, the first editor of the "Butte Inter Mountain" newspaper.

According to the family, Gibson and Maud first met at copper baron William Clark's amusement park, Columbia Gardens.

- The fact that she had social standing, a kind of social standing that he didn't have, meant that by marrying into that family, he was actually elevating himself to meet the right people, to have the right connections, to be respected in the community.

- [Narrator] Gibson spent five years in Butte learning his trade and wooing Lockley before striking out on his own in Missoula.

He made the move in 1888, and he and Maud posed for their wedding portrait the following year.

In 1889, Missoula was a major crossroads and an economic hub.

Miners, farmers, and timber workers crowded the wooden sidewalks, and they gathered in ramshackle log cabins, storefronts and saloons along the muddy streets.

- It was a kind of a mess of a town.

I mean, it was platted in, you know, north, south, east, west, with, you know, our typical western patterns.

But the town itself was wild and wooly.

It was a frontier town.

- [Narrator] The city was home to 4,500 people and it was growing quickly.

Gibson arrived just in time to take advantage of that growth.

- Having had a couple of fires that had devastated the downtown, needed architects and needed contractors, needed builders.

- [Narrator] Because of the fires, residents wanted brick buildings to replace log and timber frames.

That gave Gibson the opening he needed, but he didn't start out alone.

In partnership with Robert Mentrum, Gibson built the first St. Patrick Hospital.

- That's when he became well known as a good contractor, as an important contractor, because this was a huge, huge job, the town's first major hospital.

Prior to that, there were small ramshackle buildings that were used as the hospital.

This was the first statement that this town has finally arrived.

- [Narrator] Gibson then ventured out of Missoula to build other hospitals for the Sisters of Charity in Great Falls and in Wallace, Idaho.

But he soon outgrew the partnership with Mentrum and set up his own practice.

And for the next 30 years, he would reshape Missoula brick by brick into Montana's Garden City.

- In short order, he was building not only private homes, but also beginning to build civic buildings and commercial buildings.

- [Narrator] One of the first private homes he built was his own.

The Queen Anne-style house went up on the south side of the river in 1891.

It had a barn behind it for his studio and a sign reading "AJ Gibson, Contractor and Builder".

Where Gibson chose to build his home would become significant for the growth of Missoula.

- [Rafael] Most of Missoula was north of the river.

Its central commercial district was north of the river, and its earliest residential neighborhoods were north of the river and up into the Rattlesnake Creek area.

- [Narrator] By rejecting those more established neighborhoods, the Gibsons became pioneers in a section known as Knowles' Addition.

It was south of the Clark Fork River in an area between Higgins Avenue and Orange Street.

The river created a natural barrier to the commercialism of downtown with its businesses, saloons and brothels.

- Gibson's neighborhood was a working class neighborhood, but still people of some means and people of a certain social standing.

They saw themselves as upper middle class.

They were good church-going people.

They were people who might have worked downtown, may have known everyone downtown, but they really preferred the quiet south side to dwell in.

- [Narrator] The area's popularity grew even more after a political battle over where to build a new bridge to replace the old one, destroyed in 1908.

Record rains in June of that year sent a torrent of water down the Clark Fork River.

The flood washed away homes, roads, and bridges, including the one at Higgins Avenue.

Some developers wanted to change the alignment of the new bridge to connect with Stevens Street and the road to the Bitterroot.

That's because they had plans for a new town called South Missoula along that route.

It's the area known today as the Slant Streets, because it was set up on a different grid than the rest of the city.

But entrepreneur Christopher Higgins and Judge Hiram Knowles favored keeping the new bridge aligned with Higgins Avenue.

That would benefit the land Knowles owned south of the river.

County government settled on the Higgins Avenue site, giving a boost to Gibson's neighborhood.

- The interesting thing for Gibson is that if you map out all the buildings that he designed, you'll notice a very peculiar thing.

He stayed out of that South Missoula addition, out of that supposed new town.

There are no houses in that entire neighborhood of the Slant Streets.

- [Narrator] Gibson's business success on the south side was also entwined with his religious faith and the social connections that came with it.

- Both AJ and Maud were very devout people.

They were both Presbyterians.

We know that they attended church every Sunday, that they were part of the life of a religious community, in this case, the first Presbyterian church in Missoula.

They were very intentional about their religious faith.

There are lots of stories that mostly Maud recounted related to how they took care of the indigent, the poor, the people around them.

- [Narrator] Photos show that the Gibsons were often surrounded by children.

They were unable to have any of their own, so they became foster parents.

- [Rafael] They took in a child.

They didn't adopt that child officially, but they raised a kid because the kid was orphaned as a baby.

- [Narrator] Maud's mother Elizabeth wrote about the couple's attachment to the child.

"The Gibsons had him till he was nearly three years old when his father married and took him away, to their great grief."

- [Narrator] The Gibsons also provided a home for two of Maud's orphaned cousins.

- That was very much a part of what it meant to be a Christian at that point in American history, and it was central to their lives.

- [Narrator] Maud told a story of a group of hunters and a rattlesnake who came across a poor family that was barely surviving.

Not only did they leave their kill with the family, but they also came back and built them a proper home.

- And she doesn't say at any point in recounting that story that it was AJ and his friends, but who else would do this?

- [Narrator] Through their church, the Gibsons also grew close to Reverend John Maclean and his family.

- They spent a lot of time with the Macleans on the Blackfoot River.

So the story of getting together fishing, enjoying camping, the out of doors, that's very much the story of the Gibsons as well.

The famous writer Norman Maclean and his brother were fixtures in the Gibson household.

Those boys grew up with the Gibsons.

- [Narrator] That involvement in the church community also helped Gibson grow his list of business clients.

But his wife Maud was an even greater asset.

She was attractive and well-educated, and she became Gibson's most ardent supporter.

- [Rafael] Maud was a go-getter, and you see that in the activities that she participated in.

If you look at the dossier of clubs that she was involved in, I mean, you realize how active this woman was.

Both in philanthropic things, or just clubs that that were of interest to her.

- [Narrator] Much of what we know about the Gibsons' family and social life comes from Maud's scrapbooks and photographs.

Curators at the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula have disassembled the books for storage and preservation.

- She wasn't just tracking his architecture and his professional development, she was tracking the fullness of their lives together, the places that they traveled to, the visits that they made, the folks they hung out with.

- [Narrator] And those friends and family are documented on picnics, on fishing and camping trips.

- There are stacks of albums that she left us behind and glass plates of all of her photography.

And it wasn't just local photographs, and you know, taking pictures of your friends and your immediate community.

No, they were going far afield to take images of the world around them.

- [Narrator] Her scrapbooks document local events like President Theodore Roosevelt's visit to Missoula, the opening of the Milltown Dam, and the landing of the first airplane in the city.

- [Rafael] And it's her notes and her asides and her inclusions in those scrapbooks that really give us a sense of the fullness of their lives.

- [Narrator] She also photographed members of the Salish and Blackfeet tribes, and her work reveals a curiosity about the Indigenous cultures of the West.

Maud's scrapbooks also demonstrate that she was active in Missoula's social circles, organizing events at their home.

- [Rafael] We sense that these folks were socially very, very engaged with their friends and their family and their community.

- [Narrator] And Maud was not shy about sharing her opinions with the community.

In 1916, she wrote a letter to "The Missoulian" newspaper supporting the prohibition of alcohol.

It told the story of a young woman the Gibsons found in tears near the Northern Pacific train depot.

Her husband was drinking in a nearby saloon.

- [Narrator] "She waited for him on a bench, hungry, sad, and lonely.

She grudgingly told us a little of her story.

The young husband was a frequenter of the saloon and liquor got the best of him.

This is only a little incident, and much more could be told.

And the telling of it is for a purpose.

Can we refuse to vote Montana dry?"

- [Narrator] She supported other causes like anti-littering campaigns, but they never took her away from documenting her husband's architecture practice where individual homes were a staple.

(stately music) Gibson promised his clients an integration of services.

The home plans he drew up would succeed because he would build them rather than hand them off to someone else who might not understand the design.

- [Narrator] "My professional services cost you nothing when it is considered that they come out of and are paid for by the waste that would presumptively result from building without well-considered plans."

- In that brochure, he describes himself as the original man.

What he means by an original man is someone who designs a building from scratch that has a sense of design.

And of course, he was promoting himself not just as a designer, as an architect.

And again, the irony of that is tremendous because he had no professional training as an architect.

- [Narrator] And his sales pitch worked.

Gibson built homes in the Queen Anne style for some of Missoula's most influential residents, including the Sid Coffee family.

Queen Anne describes the preferred style of the late Victorian age, from the end of the 19th century through the beginning of the 20th.

The designs feature a classic storybook look with asymmetrical towers and turrets and porches with intricate details.

Gibson's designs in this style quickly filled his south side neighborhood.

(cheerful music) - [Rafael] So the Beck House really reveals the importance of asymmetry in these Queen Anne style houses as a kind of building principle.

So you'll notice how asymmetrical the whole facade is and how asymmetrical the volumes of the house are.

- [Narrator] Gibson designed the grandest of his Queen Anne homes in the Rattlesnake for Thomas Greenough.

Greenough owned gold and silver mines near Wallace, Idaho, a bank in Spokane, Washington, and lumber interests in Montana.

- The construction of that mansion cemented his reputation as a great builder, as a great designer and builder.

And I think that house alone catalyzed a number of other projects, mostly in the south side.

- [Narrator] But by the turn of the century, public tastes began to shift away from Queen Anne style, and Gibson's designs shifted along with them.

That change is evident in the way he remodeled the home of Missoula County attorney Joseph Dixon.

- Dixon was a big man in Montana.

He served in the state legislature as a Congressman and as a Senator and eventually became governor of the state, but his roots were in the South.

- [Narrator] Gibson honored those roots by transforming the Queen Anne building into a Roman revival home, reminiscent of Southern mansions.

- [Rafael] So we have this grand neoclassical facade, a temple entrance, almost as if he were saying, "A man's home is his temple."

Not just his castle, it's his temple.

- [Narrator] Some of Gibson's homes like the Gustav Peterson residence mix the older and newer styles.

Gibson moved further in his eclectic decoration during his most prolific period, from 1900 to 1909.

But not all of Gibson's designs were in such a grand style.

His homes for the middle and working classes focused on convenience and economy.

Some designs are so simple that they could have been intended for a single person.

But he also responded to the growing demand for higher-density housing.

- The town needed to expand and it needed to expand very quickly.

The idea of building duplexes and quadriplexes and multiunit buildings, blocks, entire blocks was in the air.

- [Narrator] First, he built duplexes like this one for the Peter Fedderson family.

Both the property owner and a tenant could live in the symmetrically divided house.

- [Rafael] The homes shared a lot.

They shared a front porch sometimes, a back porch sometimes, but that was it.

They were basically two different homes stuck together.

- [Narrator] But Gibson also developed large apartment blocks and row houses for multiple tenants.

They were substantial brick buildings like the Bowland Apartments.

- [Rafael] The Bowland Flat basically is the same unit repeated on the ground level and on the second story.

So it's basically a two unit building.

But that unit, that module is then repeated four times across the block.

- [Narrator] The design often includes a projecting bay window that adds texture to the facade.

Gibson's most confident version of the modular row houses is the Johnson Flats.

The six units have porches with simplified square Roman columns and bay windows that bring in a lot of light.

Gibson's blocks appear throughout Missoula's University District and the south side.

But Gibson's influence also shaped the look and feel of Missoula's downtown business district.

(upbeat music) He made his first mark there in 1895 with a three story building on the northeast corner of Higgins Avenue and what is now Broadway.

- [Rafael] Missoula's economy was at a down moment.

And he took a risk, took a gamble, took out a loan, built this building on that significant corner.

- [Narrator] More than 125 years later, the location is still in the heart of Missoula's downtown.

But Gibson's original building is now encased inside a newer structure.

- [Rafael] The building was enlarged by a couple stories and completely redone in a modernist international style in the 1950s.

So there is still one wall of the Gibson building, the northern wall, which is still visible today.

But you can't recognize that as a Gibson building.

- [Narrator] Other commercial buildings followed.

At one time, Gibson had buildings on all four corners of Higgins and Pine.

Three of them are still standing.

- [Rafael] And they've been much altered, as is true with most commercial buildings.

One of them has lost an upper story to a fire.

The other one, the street level has been completely altered.

- [Narrator] As businesses expanded south of the river, Gibson's commercial buildings followed.

One of the most prominent on Higgins Avenue is the Jacobson's store from 1909.

- [Rafael] It has a rather fancy, very simple but nevertheless impressive brick and plate glass facade.

But it's a long narrow sliver of a building that actually contained two stores.

- [Narrator] The Jacobson's store typifies Gibson's simple, pragmatic commercial buildings.

But evidence of his more complex designs stands less than a mile to the east on the University of Montana campus.

(upbeat music) The legislature created the university in 1893, and students arrived two years later before there was a campus.

President Oscar Craig was working to secure a donation of 40 acres just below Mount Sentinel.

The Indigenous Salish and Kalispel people had cared for that land for generations before their forced removal to the Flathead Reservation in 1891.

The first plans for the university show a large oval with three buildings to the east.

They were labeled Main Building, Ladies Hall, and Science Hall.

Gibson would design those along with the gymnasium and a library.

- [Rafael] To win the contract for the first five buildings on the state university, the flagship university, was huge for his career.

- [Narrator] First came the sturdy brick science hall in 1898.

In 1902, the building caught fire and was almost entirely rebuilt.

The university demolished it in 1983, despite a public outcry.

Main Hall also opened in 1898.

It was Gibson's showpiece and the building most identified with the university.

Its location was integral to the campus design.

- [Rafael] Main Hall stands at the eastern end of this very important axis that runs east-west.

It is the focal point, it's the high point of the whole plan.

- [Narrator] Main Hall anchors the rest of the buildings and lawns that form one of the most beautiful campuses in the West.

- [Rafael] So what we see is a building that is massive, heavy.

It has this heavy stone rusticated base with a grand arch leading into the building itself, into the structure.

And then as the building rises to the second and third stories, it lightens, as you can see, and then it culminates in these amazing neogothic towers.

It was a symbolic moment for the university and for the state.

It basically meant that civilization, as it was known back east, had arrived here.

- [Narrator] Next, Gibson designed a woman's dormitory in 1901.

- [Rafael] It was a grand building, and it needed to be because young women were courted from the start here.

- [Narrator] The building's style points to its residential function, and it sets the dormitory apart from the stodgier academic buildings while keeping it compatible.

- [Rafael] Later in the 1920s, the building became an academic structure as new dormitories were built, and the building was eventually stripped down and it became the current math building.

- [Narrator] In 1903, Cruz completed work on Gibson's gymnasium.

It was the first building not on the oval, and the first built with wood.

- The gymnasium was a functional building.

It was built on the cheap and it was meant to be a temporary structure.

And so we lost that one early on, and it was replaced by a newer gymnasium in the 1920s.

- [Narrator] It had a grand entry with two great towers evoking a medieval gate.

The gym stood to the north of the main hall until it was demolished in 1965.

Gibson's final project for the university was a library in 1908.

The original library was in the basement of Main Hall, but President Oscar Craig longed for a new high-class library.

Gibson responded in the Neoclassic style.

These temple-like buildings had become popular after they appeared in the White City at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.

- Gibson was responding to the popular taste.

So there's a huge between 1898 when University Hall opens, and 1909, when he builds his last building on the campus as a library.

- [Narrator] It's an imposing design that stands out from his earlier, more intimate campus buildings.

- [Rafael] The other buildings look somewhat quaint in relationship to that sort of bombastic, a great grand staircase, you have to walk past those great gigantic columns to enter this building.

- [Narrator] It became the law school library in 1921, and later a general classroom building.

The university eventually renamed it to honor Missoula peace activist Jeannette Rankin, who was the first woman elected to Congress.

Gibson's success at the University of Montana led to other academic commissions, including St. Mary's Academy, later renamed Sacred Heart Academy.

Around 1905, he designed an ornate three story building for the new Garden City Commercial College.

Students learned bookkeeping, business practices, and office management under twin candle snuffer towers.

Today the building is known as the Babs Apartments.

And Gibson designed the Missoula County High School, now known as Hellgate High.

A fire in 1931 altered the structure, but Gibson's design is still visible at the core.

While most of Gibson's buildings are in Missoula, some of his most important designs stand in the Bitterroot Valley.

Lewis and Clark passed through this broad basin on their journey to the Pacific Ocean in 1805.

Later, a wave of illegal settlers began farming, ranching, and lodging there, eventually displacing the Indigenous Salish tribe.

Butte copper king Marcus Daly toured the Bitterroot in 1886 and quickly saw its economic potential.

He was looking for cheap timber for his mining operation in Butte and for his smelter in Anaconda.

But he also wanted a ranch site for his thoroughbred horses and a location for a summer home.

He tried to buy the town of Grantsdale in 1890 to anchor his investment, but he failed, and then decided to start his own town.

- Hamilton has that distinguishing feature that it was in fact a Marcus Daly construction.

The whole thing was his idea.

- [Narrator] Daly built a dam and sawmill there, becoming the new town's principal employer.

That was around the same time that AJ and Maud Gibson began traveling to the Bitterroot, often camping with friends like the Maclean family.

- He probably was recruited by the Daly family to work in the Bitterroot stock farms and other properties that were taking place or needed to be built in downtown Hamilton, downtown Stevensville, some of the towns that were really picking up in that decade.

- [Narrator] Gibson's first major project was the Ravalli County Courthouse in Hamilton.

The city needed the building after it wrested the county seat away from Stevensville in 1898.

- We don't know precisely how Gibson was chosen, except that in this case there was a competition.

Gibson won that competition.

How much influence there was from Daly and the company, that's not quite clear.

- [Narrator] But Gibson's two story design was popular with the public and drew comparisons to his Main Hall at the university.

- It had a big bell tower, a beautiful prominent entry.

And Gibson was showing off in some ways.

I mean, it's on city corner, on a corner lot.

And it's the kind of building that meant power and prestige and stability for this new county seat.

And it basically meant ideologically that civilization had arrived in the Bitterroot Valley.

- [Narrator] Gibson next designed the town hall about a block away.

It housed both city government and the fire department.

- You know it's an important civic structure because it has that bell tower and it has that prominent entryway.

And the garage doors or the bays for the firehouse are actually on the side of the building.

- [Narrator] But it was a series of commercial buildings in downtown Hamilton that secured Gibson's reputation in the Bitterroot.

The McGrath block on West Main is Gibson's most confident commercial design in Hamilton.

- [Rafael] It really speaks a language of the most sort of deliciously opulent architecture in the early 20th century.

But the fact that you had this one architect who had such an influence on the buildings that were designed here means that in some ways he shaped, helped to give the urban fabric its present shape.

So Hamilton is indeed an AJ Gibson town.

- [Narrator] But his most significant commission in the valley came from Marcus Daly's widow Margaret.

In 1889, the Dalys had bought a farmhouse east of Hamilton, known as Riverside.

- [Rafael] And there are lots of anecdotes about how that house just kept growing over the years, mostly through the activities of Mrs. Daly, who kept expanding it and adding turrets and towers and porches to this magnificent house.

- [Narrator] Several years later, the family began discussing a new larger home.

But when Marcus Daly died in 1900, Margaret waited six years before moving ahead.

- Mrs. Daly wanted to build a house that was in fact quaint in terms of its style, and at the same time was a house that was historically right for this spectacular setting.

- [Narrator] Mrs. Daly envisioned a mammoth residence with 24 guest rooms, with a budget of $35 to $70,000.

Rather than demolish the Queen Anne home, Gibson stripped much of it down and built around the remains.

- [Rafael] Even from the minute that you walk past its gates and you go down that phenomenal allee of trees, you know you're in a very special setting.

And that allee prepares you for this fantastic facade with its pedimental front and four gigantic columns and this symmetrical array of windows that says you've arrived at a grand place.

- [Narrator] Lots of alterations delayed the completion until 1910, when it became the largest home in Montana.

The mansion struck a balance, accommodating the needs of Mrs. Daly's family and social set without offending the neighbors in her adopted state.

- This house is in fact a manifestation of the Gilded Age in Montana, the wealth of the copper kings, the wealth of the extraction industries that existed here.

So whether you're talking timber or ore, Montana was delivering to the world, and it was now on a global stage.

- [Narrator] Gibson's grandest residence proved that he could stand comfortably on that stage.

But an ambitious new courthouse for Missoula would become his greatest challenge.

(energetic music) - [Rafael] Missoulians began to feel a little bit of an inferiority complex given that Ravalli County, this new county seat, the town of Hamilton had this beautiful county courthouse.

And here we were with a very dilapidated old building kind of from the rustic pioneer days.

And so the idea was that that building needed to come down, and the county commissioners decided to open a competition.

- [Narrator] The commissioners appointed Gibson supervising architect, and designs came in from seven Montana firms and from out of state.

- [Rafael] Strangely enough, the county commissioners rejected all of them, including AJ Gibson's design.

And they did that on the argument that most of the competitors had missed the directions or didn't follow the directions.

- [Narrator] But there may have been artistic concerns as well.

Only one set of plans survives other than Gibson's, and it includes curious details like cannons on the roof line.

But instead of reopening the competition, the commissioners hired Gibson at a fee not to exceed $150,000.

"The Missoula Herald" newspaper speculated that favoritism was involved.

- [Rafael] We don't know if that's true or not.

We do know that Gibson had friends across parties on the board, and that he had actually served in city government at some point, and so was familiar with all of these gentlemen.

So we don't know that that's actually true, but that's what the press said.

And members of the Chamber of Commerce also argued that.

- [Narrator] Rejected architect NC Gauntt complained in a letter to "The Herald".

He claimed the commissioners had ordered Gibson to use the best ideas from the competing plans in his design.

And Gauntt threatened to sue.

- [Narrator] "Do the people of Missoula County imagine that they can escape payment for plans stolen or copied or for any features of plans shown by competitors and copied?

Do not be deceived on this point."

- [Narrator] "The Herald" followed up with an editorial calling out two of the Republican commissioners.

- [Narrator] "It appears that the county commissioners, Andrews and Worden, are largely to blame in this matter, and on their shoulders should rest the burden, which taxpayers are likely to be called upon to undergo."

- [Narrator] Gibson even received hate mail warning him not to take the job.

- [Narrator] "Gibson, we advise you to refuse to accept the proposition.

We want to see a good courthouse.

This is the last call and will not be repeated.

Feathers and tar are just waiting for you."

- [Narrator] Gibson had little room to maneuver, and for the first time in his career, the attacks became personal.

Gauntt didn't follow through with a lawsuit, but the damage to Gibson's reputation was done.

And the problems with building the courthouse were only beginning.

Faulty materials from subcontractors forced construction delays.

- And that was all on Gibson's shoulders.

I mean, maybe it wasn't his fault, I mean, these were supply chain problems.

But it was still his responsibility.

- [Narrator] Gibson had promised the building would be finished in 1908, but it wasn't, and he retired a year later in the midst of the controversy.

His greatest shame may have been looking at the date of 1908 carved above the building's entrance when it finally opened in 1910.

But despite all the problems, the design for the courthouse was a success.

- [Rafael] So the building has two really distinctive elements.

And of course, the first is that enormous portico that you enter, and you take this grand staircase into the heart of the building.

And then the second element that you see is of course that wonderful clock tower up on top.

And so those two features really are what make this neoclassical building a marvelous structure.

- [Narrator] The three story tower is capped by a copper roof.

Gibson used an iron structure to support it, which was considered modern technology at the time.

- [Rafael] What's really interesting is the materials used on the exterior of the building.

So you'll notice that it has this beautiful glazed terracotta block in this light gray-whitish material that gleams in strong sunlight.

That material was not used very readily or commonly in the west, so his use of that was risky for this climate, for this environment.

- [Narrator] But the risk paid off and the community welcomed the new building.

- [Rafael] Ironically, even the papers that were most strident in their critique of AJ Gibson acknowledged that this was a beautiful building, that it was a worthy building for this community.

- [Narrator] "The Missoulian" newspaper had stayed out of the controversy, but weighed in on the result.

- [Narrator] "It's a model structure.

Missoula has as good a courthouse as there is in the West, and one that is better than most of them."

- [Narrator] Even "The Herald" praised it in an editorial.

- [Narrator] "The viewer cannot but admit that it is a building that does great credit to the city and the county."

- [Narrator] Maud Gibson clipped the critique for her scrapbook, and AJ wrote a note in the margin of the "Herald" editorial that showed he hadn't lost his sense of humor.

- [Narrator] "What the stinky-dinky paper says."

- [Narrator] The ordeal of the Missoula County courthouse had hastened Gibson's retirement, but it wasn't the only factor.

More professionally trained architects were going into business, and competitive bidding was replacing the personal connections that had fueled Gibson's success.

But he did take on some special projects in retirement.

He remodeled his own home in the craftsman style, and he donated designs for a new building for the First Presbyterian Church.

He also returned to work in the Bitterroot Valley to design and build a farmhouse for family friends.

- And he seemed to enjoy being on the job site.

I mean, most of these pictures in Maud's album are of him, you know, running around the house, wearing an apron, holding a hammer.

- [Narrator] But it's other photos from the Bitterroot that raise an intriguing possibility.

They show Gibson's car parked outside Frank Lloyd Wright's Bitterroot Inn during its construction.

The hotel near Stevensville was one of the earliest examples of Wright's prairie style outside the Midwest.

- Now, there's no evidence that he actually met Frank Lloyd Wright in his limited visits to the state.

But the fact that Gibson's car was parked in front of that building, and it seemed to have been moving day, because the whole front of the building is piled high with the furnishings for the new hotel.

That indicates to us that Gibson was at least interested and curious about this newfangled architecture showing up in the Bitterroot.

- [Narrator] Gibson also helped design the Wilma Theater during his retirement.

But while architecture remained a part of Gibson's life, he devoted much of his retirement to a different passion.

(cheerful music) - One might even argue that in some ways AJ Gibson cared more about cars than he did buildings.

- [Narrator] The photographs in Maud's scrapbooks reveal the couple's love of automobile travel.

They formed a local car club and often wrote about their adventures.

They were hooked after they bought a one cylinder Oldsmobile during a visit to Minneapolis in 1902.

In 1923, Gibson told an interviewer about the test drive.

- [Narrator] "The man took me around the block.

He didn't dare go any further for fear it would break down, but I didn't know it then.

It rattled and jingled like sleigh bells when it was standing at the curb."

- [Narrator] It was only the third car in Missoula, and it packed 3.5 horsepower.

- This was a car that didn't have a steering wheel, it had a lever that you used to steer it.

And according to some of Maud's descriptions, the thing sounded like it was ready to blow up the minute you turned the engine.

But it did what it needed to do, which was to let them get out and about.

- [Narrator] The Oldsmobile broke down frequently.

And according to Mrs. Gibson, it actually scared a horse to death in 1903.

But it was the first automobile to cross the Flathead Reservation.

- And then they kept replacing that automobile with fancier versions and other brands of cars.

- [Narrator] The couple's fourth vehicle was a Premier 660 touring car.

It took them to New York City, logging more than 7,000 miles at about 100 miles a day.

The car navigated unpaved and muddy roads and newspapers closely followed the couple's exploits.

The Premier may have been the first car to cross the Rocky Mountains without breaking down.

- They were the first Montanans to cross the Canadian border in an automobile, the first ones to cross the Mexican border, first Montanans to drive to California, first Montanans to drive to New York City.

I mean, this was a very heady set of accomplishments for them.

- [Narrator] The road conditions for the Canadian trip were particularly unpredictable.

The travelers would often need a pull to get out of the mud or a push to make it up a steep hill.

And they were always fixing holes in the tires.

- [Rafael] It was an ordeal, but it was also the adventure of traveling.

- The Gibsons ventured to California in 1912.

Maud photographed silent film sets on the beach between Malibu and Santa Monica, and she captured shots of crews filming an early Western.

The Golden State had such an allure that the Gibsons made a second trip in 1914.

- We did not have an interstate highway system at that point, so all roads were local roads.

Some were paved, many weren't.

They were risking their lives by going on the road.

Think about there weren't gasoline stations on every corner, so they had to plan ahead.

Gibson had to modify the automobile so it could carry extra canisters of gas.

- [Narrator] They crossed the Mexican border during their second trip, and they took in the Santa Monica races, which must have thrilled the car-loving people.

The Gibsons embraced both the opportunity and the adventure of automobile travel.

But AJ began seeing the old-fashioned way of touring fading away.

- [Narrator] "Automobiling is nothing now to what it used to be.

It's too tame."

- [Narrator] And Maud lamented the loss of open spaces.

- [Narrator] "One by one, barbed wire entanglements are closing up the picnic grounds.

To the old timer, it seems an affront."

- [Narrator] But they believed in the future of the automobile, and they invested in it.

- There's lots of financial records in the archives indicating that they were buying shares in all kinds of aspects of the industry.

But eventually they invested in the first two gasoline stations in Missoula, Montana.

- [Narrator] Their intuition about the success of the car in American culture proved to be true.

But the couple's love of driving would come to a poignant end.

In the afternoon of December 31st, 1927, AJ and Maud Gibson left their home in their Studebaker sedan, heading west.

They were going to buy flowers, most likely for a New Year's Eve party.

At around the same time, Milwaukee Passenger Train Number One left the station near the Higgins Avenue Bridge, also heading west.

At about 4:10 PM, the Studebaker and the train collided at the corner of Dakota and Grant Streets.

A coroner's report concluded that the Gibsons died instantly.

An inquest cleared the train crew of any blame, and the press concluded that two factors led to the accident.

Gibson was by all accounts deaf and didn't hear the train whistle, and neither AJ nor Maud saw the train coming because the windows of the car were frosted over.

- They were so devoted to being in that car and participating in driving and motoring that it's sad that their lives ended in an automobile crash.

When the Gibsons died in late 1927, I mean, they were literally called Missoula pioneers.

They had been there in the earliest days after statehood after 1889, when the town itself began to grow and develop.

But they were pioneers in other fields as well.

Clearly pioneers in great architecture, but they were also pioneers in motoring.

They were also pioneers in photography.

And they lived fabulous lives, and I think they deserve the title of pioneers.

- [Narrator] They were buried in the Missoula city cemetery near a monument that Maud designed.

At the funeral, the Gibsons' former pastor and friend, the Reverend John Maclean, spoke to the hundreds of mourners.

- [Narrator] "They were beautiful in their love for each other, a love that grew in tenderness and sweetness.

We speak of the sadness of this hour with our hearts burdened with the tragedy of it.

I'm not sure we should do that.

They were enjoying a sweet hour of companionship when the crash came, and then hand in hand, they went home to heaven."

- In many ways, the Gibsons were prepared for their deaths.

They loved life, certainly, but the fact that they were planning, that Maud designed their monument at the cemetery indicates to me that they were in some ways ready to go whenever the time should come.

- [Narrator] Maud's rock monument seems particularly apt for her husband's calling.

- That idea of the large boulder, this rough piece of stone is symbolic, because of course, it's the stone that gets fashioned by the builder, the architect into the human-built space.

And so the symbolism there was pretty powerful, that Gibson shaped the physical world.

- [Narrator] It also aligns with what Chicago architect Louis Sullivan wrote about the profession.

- [Narrator] "The architect who combines in his being the power of vision, of imagination, of intellect, of sympathy with human need and the power to interpret them in the language of vernacular and time is he who shall create poems in stone."

- [Narrator] Today, Gibson's stone and wooden poems stand as reminders of Montana's past.

They're symbols of what the state was and a measure of how it's changed.

But they also paid tribute to the Gibsons, and to the self-styled architect and builder who conceived and constructed an original vision of Montana.

(upbeat music) (mellow music)