The historic Lincoln School in Missoula's Rattlesnake Valley has been sold to a California developer who plans to turn the school into a residence or condominiums.

The Rattlesnake Valley's historic Lincoln School may soon be remodeled into a residence or condominiums, with 12 new homes built in the old schoolyard, as the church that for years owned the building heads west of Reserve Street.

“We've already sold it,” said Lincoln School Baptist Church pastor Chuck Lee. The sale closed in mid-June.
Lincoln School's new owner is R.C. Hobbs Co., an Orange, Calif.-based real estate developer with ties to Missoula. A site plan has not yet been submitted to the Office of Planning and Grants but will be soon, said architect Jamie Hoffmann, who is working on the project.

Designed in 1914 by Missoula architect Ole Bakke, Lincoln School is a virtually unaltered and rare example in Montana of the arts and crafts design movement, say documents submitted to the National Register of Historic Places.

“It's a landmark,” said Philip Maechling, Missoula's historic preservation officer.

It's also a valuable chunk of real estate. In 1993, the Baptist church bought the school for about $80,000 and cleared $800,000 in the recent sale.

The sale, the planned construction, the church's move west - even the old school building itself - tell a chapter in the ever-changing story of Missoula.

A bit more than a century ago, Missoula was emerging as a major industrial and transportation center in western Montana. With the completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad and its passenger depot in 1899, residential neighborhoods began to spring up in Missoula and the Rattlesnake valleys.

In 1902, Rattlesnake residents petitioned school board trustees to build a schoolhouse in the valley. A one-room, wood-frame building was built on a lot purchased from the County Poor Farm that year.

Soon the tiny school was overcrowded. In 1910, Rattlesnake kids above the fourth grade had to hike down the valley, cross Rattlesnake Creek, the railroad siding and the streetcar tracks to get to Central School, now the home of Missoula Children's Theatre, on East Broadway.

In 1914 Bakke, who over his career designed a number of prominent local buildings including Franklin and Alberton schools and the Forestry Building at the University of Montana, employed features of the arts and crafts movement for Lincoln School. Those include the stone and brick detailing, its roof line with exposed eaves and supporting brackets, as well as the building's overall massing and look.

The elementary school, which cost nearly $11,000 to build, took in students and two teachers in the fall of 1914 and remained open, almost continuously, until 1982.

In 1997, the Montana State Preservation Office submitted a successful application to the National Park Service to gain Lincoln School listing on the National Register of Historic Places, citing the brick and stone building's exposed wood rafters and gable ends, the arches over the windows and entrance, and decorative panel on the front of the building.

It's unclear if or how the development will alter the school's place on the historic register, Maechling said. The designation carries no restrictions on reconstruction or development.

In 1989, Missoula's newly founded Central Baptist Church opened with services at the Holiday Inn Parkside. About four years later, the church bought the former school from Missoula County Public Schools for $80,000.

Chuck Lee arrived in Missoula a few days after Christmas in 1993 as the new pastor for the renamed Lincoln School Baptist Church.

Despite its name, Lee said, the church never was a neighborhood institution, but rather served a far-flung Baptist community. Some worshippers regularly traveled from as far as Seeley Lake and Lolo.

As Missoula expanded west in the 1990s and since, worship patterns changed, too, Lee said. It makes sense for a church to relocate near the new development west of Reserve Street, he said.

The Lincoln School church felt the limitations of its location and the size of the old facility. It's a beautiful building but small for a church, only about 3,800 square feet, Lee said.

When Lee tried to grow the congregation, reaching out to the community and offering two services on Sunday, the number of regular attendees reached as high as 160, but the place felt cramped, he said. These days, the church has about 90 regular members.

Several years ago, Lee and the church's building committee began to consider other options. The church's land and building had appreciated tremendously since the purchase. The ever-expanding developments across the western edge of Missoula held the greatest promise of a community for the church to serve.

The church settled on a plot of land on American Way behind Home Depot in a subdivision under development by Bob Brugh of Neighborhoods by Design LLC. The church purchased the property in April, Lee said.

Lee said the church plans to build a larger structure with a 400-seat auditorium on the new lot, almost one acre in size.

“I don't know if you're familiar with the process. We want to design a building. So we get the preliminary drawings, see the astronomical price and say, ‘Woah! We have to redesign,' ” Lee said.

“We're not just moving the church physically, we're looking at reinventing ourselves,” he said. “We are who we are, but we're trying to reach people and meet the needs in our community. We know we need to be more progressive in our methodology, although the message is 2,000 years old.”

The move brings with it an element of risk for the church. The church grossed $800,000 from the sale of the historic school. That cash paid for the property on American Way and will put a good down payment on the new church, but it won't cover everything, Lee said.

“How will it work? We really don't have a clue. I don't know when we'll be moving out of the old place and into the new. That's where our faith comes in,” Lee said.

The name, too, will change.

“We're thinking about having Hellgate Meadows (the name of Brugh's development) in the name, but nothing's firm. We're excited about it. It's an exercise in faith. It's a more expensive and bigger project that we can do ourselves,” Lee said.

Roger Hobbs, president of R.C. Hobbs, began conversations about Lincoln School with Hoffmann, who specializes in historic architectural work, Hoffmann said.

The zoning for the property, R-8, allows up to eight residential units per acre. The school sits on almost two acres.

“Our intention is to keep the school intact, building nothing in front of it, to honor that building,” Hoffmann said.

Zoning would allow six duplexes in the triangular parcel of land, but Hoffmann and Hobbs instead hope to develop the land as a planned neighborhood cluster, building a dozen homes in the arts and crafts style to match the architecture of the historic school. Hoffmann doesn't want to build something that looks like a cookie-cutter development, but rather an individualized collection of similar homes.

“We think we can do a better design by using the flexibility inherent in the PNC ordinance,” Hoffmann said.

The Missoula City Council recently voted to end an 18-month moratorium on planned neighborhood clusters. This is one of the first projects since then to employ the ordinance.

As for the old school, the plans remain fluid and depend on who wants to buy the structure. It could be turned into condos or left as one big house.

“It's going to be sold. It's zoned residential. The expectation is that it will be used for residential property. It's like a big-city loft - 13-foot ceilings and maple floors,” Hoffmann said.

A site plan could be submitted to city planners as soon as Monday, he said. A community meeting is tentatively planned for August.

“It hasn't been scheduled yet, but that's the plan,” Hoffmann said.