Snow drifted down on the crowd as the historic “Hotel Baxter” sign was relit Thursday night, once again glowing above the downtown sky. “A crown jewel of Bozeman,” U.S. Senator Max Baucus told people gathered outside at the corner of Main Street and Grand Avenue just before the sign was turned on. Exceptfor a few test runs, the 32-foot high and 45-foot wide electric sign has stood dark for decades atop downtown’s tallest building. The sign was erected in 1929 on the roof of the seven-story Baxter Hotel, on the corner of Main Street and Willson Avenue. The sign’s builder, August H. Lake, intended it to be seen from as far as Butte. “It is not claimed that the letters can be distinguished for such great distances, but the reflection of the electric light in the sky from the sign will be intense enough to be easily located and thereby serve as a beacon for travelers as far away as the Butte hill in the west,” stated an article published in the Chronicle when the hotel opened. “One will also be able to see the glow in the sky from all highways entering Bozeman for great distances.” The sign has been sanded and repainted black and yellow, colors believed to be original. At Thursday night’s relighting ceremony, speakers included majority owner of the Baxter David Loseff, Sen. Baucus and Deputy Mayor Jeff Krauss. Baucus announced that he and his wife Mel are moving to Bozeman from Helena. “We’ll start building pretty soon,” he said. As the red, neon “Hotel Baxter” sign lit up the cold evening, the blue light,...
Back in the 1920s, in the days before commercial airports, interstate highways, and chain motels, travelers arriving in a city always headed downtown to find a good meal and a good place to stay. Every town worth its measure had a downtown hotel or two, and a good one was a source of immense pride to the community. Not only did a landmark hotel attract visitors and business, it became a center for the town itself, a community gathering place and a home for civic events. Bozeman’s Baxter Hotel was designed to serve just such a role, and it has done so not for the better part of a century, the social and architectural focal point of the city’s downtown. The origins of the Baxter date to the mid-1920s, an era when Bozeman was still a mid-sized farm town, roughly the same size as Livingston and thoroughly overshadowed by the urban metropolis of Butte. Back then, the city’s primary hostelry was the Bozeman Hotel, an imposing, rambling structure that dated from the 1890s. Though it was still the largest building on Main Street three decades later, the Bozeman was beginning to seem faded and out-of-date in the faster-moving twentieth century. The city’s civic and business leaders felt this keenly, and worried that the lack of an up-to-date hotel would make it harder for Bozeman to grow. The town needed a new, modern hotel. Their goal in mind, Bozeman’s leading citizens set to work. In 1927, a group of sixteen prominent Bozemanites, led by Eugene Graf, gathered to form the Bozeman Community Hotel Corporation, which would build the new hotel....
