HELENA — A nearly one-hundred-year-old barn, which has many hidden stories and symbolizes resilience, now has a new purpose on Summer Star Ranch outside Helena.
“My wife looked at the barn and fell in love with it and said I want that barn,” Matthew Daw said.
Daw and his wife Starr have been running Summer Star Ranch since 2005, and they want to bring people a real Montana experience through their weddings and cabins.
Daw said, “We just get a chance to show people that have never been to Montana what Montana is really about.”
The Treasure State is all about its rich history and humble beginnings, just like the newest member of the Daw family.
“We have always been about saving the past,” Daw said. Saving old cabins and wagons, too.
The barn is more than what meets the eye. It belonged to Eddie Barbeau, an Ojibway elder who worked to unify the Helena area’s diverse indian population.
“We are going to do a dedication in the barn for him,” said Daw.
You can still see the impact he left behind on the barn’s door, a moment that recognizes his work training sled dogs at Camp Rimini during World War II.
“To see a barn like this and all he did in his lifetime is tremendous when you look back at his history and the impacts he made not only in Helena but in the United States,” Daw said. “For us, it was an added bonus.”
Back in 2006, the couple fell in love with the old barn that sat where Super One is today, but it was not feasible to haul it to the property.
But now, nearly twenty years after love at first sight, multiple moves, and a fire, the historic red barn belongs to the couple with stories they could have never imagined.
Daw said, “There is buried history in there, and I am really looking forward to when we get it done and just being able to see it in the way it was almost 100 years ago.”
As for what’s next, they are preserving the structure’s history with the first step of putting the barn on a foundation in the spring.
“We are going to keep everything to historic as it was, the colors will be the same,” Daw said. “She is just going to get cleaned up and get a nice coat of paint.”
They will eventually house horses in the barn, but memorializing Eddie and the barn’s past matters most.
“We got to save part of his legacy,” said Daw.
