prairie county museum and cameron gallery

The ladies at this museum - all of them - are extremely helpful in finding photos and information on family members from the area.

This place is great when you can get in to see it. Often there is no one there to let you in, even during the posted hours. Once you get in though, the museum and Cameron Gallery are great! Worth seeing, but call ahead to see if they'll be there!

We stopped by this lovely little town in June 2010 to see Evelyn Cameron's photos that were taken 1894 to 1928. We were very pleased to visit museum and the Cameron Gallery which is right next door. Our tour guide was an elderly women in a wheel chair. She had so much knowledge of the area and also Lady Cameron. We listened to every word she said - she was fabulous. She suggested reading the book about Lady Cameron. She said that people from all over the world visit here. As soon as we returned from our trip we checked out the book from the local library - Photographing Montana by Donna Lucey. However, there were many more of her pictures in Terry. We were so happy that we stopped by. We hope to visit again. By the way, the museum is free - but we gave a donation. In addition to Lady Cameron's photos, there are others there also by other artists. This little museum is a truly a gem.

If you love tiny little ranching towns just bursting with "quaint," you'll love Terry. It's a two-road town, really, featuring one restaurant, one hotel, a gas station, and the Prairie Drive-Inn, an old drive-in theater. We stopped in Terry to see the Cameron gallery, photographs taken by Lady Cameron in the late 1800s, documenting the hard life on the plains, and full of photos of wildlife, interesting landscpaes, and her neighbors, poor homesteaders struggling to make it. Lady Cameron herself was a pretty fascinating lady, but what made our visit really fantastic was the woman running the Prairie County Museum. We arrived just when the museum opened, and she was all by herself, but she took the time to show us every room of the bank building, including the basement and vaults, telling us stories along the way. The Prairie County Museum is a lot like other country county museums in my opinion. It is full of the stuff of other people's lives, like a silver teapot given to the first woman to vote in Prairie County, and a model of the dress someone's grandma wore in 1909 to visit a sister in Billings. Everything is well-tagged, and our wonderful guide kept prompting us with, "If you have any questions, just ask, I'll be happy to try and explain everything." She had so many stories! It was a wonderful visit, and although the town is miniscule, and as our guide told us all the younger people are moving away, I would happily spend more time there someday. The setting is really Big Sky Country, complete with so many rainbows!