Two decades at Savenac

HAUGAN – For the past twenty years, the historic Savenac Nursery near Haugan has welcomed volunteers who come to the facility for one week in the summer to help maintain a place that was instrumental in rebuilding forests in the area after the devastating fire of 1910 swept through the region destroying nearly everything in its path.

As part of the nationwide Partnership in Time (PIT) volunteer program, people from all over the country have the opportunity to spend their time at a number of historic places across the country that need help keeping the elements at bay. The Savenac Nursery in Haugan is one such place and last week, volunteers descended upon the facility to make repairs to buildings and to give other attributes of the site a makeover with a fresh coat of paint.

And while volunteers with the PIT program can choose from a number of options as to where they wish to spend their time, one volunteer has been coming back to Savenac year after year after year. In her twentieth year volunteering with PIT, Isabelle or ‘Izzy” Washburn has been coming to Savenac every one of those 20 years. Washburn said, after her first year at the nursery, she simply fell in love with the idyllic location and the soothing atmosphere she found in Mineral County.

“I winter in Yuma, Arizona but I come back to Montana every summer,” Washburn said. “It’s because of the ambience of the place. It’s beautiful here and it needs to be maintained.”

Washburn said it wasn’t just the aesthetics of the location that appealed to her personally. She said the importance of the site in the history of the region was also something that keeps drawing her back to Mineral County.

“The history is also very important here,” Washburn said. “This was one of the first nurseries in the west. It was established in 1907. It’s too important to just give it up. I’ve worked with other PIT programs but this is my favorite. This time, we’ve been cleaning and painting and all kinds of things.”

Washburn said, after 20 years looking after the Savenac Nursery, she was thinking about making this her last year. One of the coordinators with the Savenac Nursery PIT Program, Beth Kennedy with the U.S. Forest Service, said volunteers such as Washburn are instrumental in helping them keep the elements from taking over.

“This is a historic site and it’s our 20th year of doing this,” Kennedy said. “The site was more or less abandoned and people were really interested in preserving the historic nature of the site. The grounds have been rediscovered and repaired. People from all over the U.S. come here. It has been going fine this year. The amount of work that these people do in a week’s time is amazing.”