Center Mark

By Cathy Moser
Photography contribued

On November 8, 1889, Montana was admitted to the union as the forty-first state, and pioneering townsfolk in Lewistown were happy to finally call their centralized hamlet, “The Heart of the State of Montana.” 

The story circulated through town and soon every Lewistown resident knew looking down the drain of Akins’ kitchen sink would reveal the center of Montana.

As legend has it, in 1912, a group of prestigious men approached the back door stoop of the Akins family home on Main Street. They knocked, Grandma Cresap answered, and they introduced themselves as federal Coast and Geodetic surveyors who had exciting news to share – Montana’s geographical center was under her kitchen sink.

The story circulated through town and soon every Lewistown resident knew looking down the drain of Akins’ kitchen sink would reveal the center of Montana. The townsfolk bragged about housing the center of Montana in their city limits; a claim which has been unabashedly celebrated, debated, and disputed.

In 1927, when Mr. and Mrs. Akins gave the house to their daughter, Bohnda, and her husband, Ray Dockery Sr., the Akins house became the Dockery house. Visitors of Lewistown were often shown the Dockery house and told of Montana’s geographical center under Mrs. Dockery’s kitchen sink. The sink and its remarkable placement warranted write ups in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” and Reader’s Digest. 

Around 1959, Ray Dockery Sr., passed the house down to his son, Ray Dockery, Jr.  Young Dockery immediately hung a copper plaque above the sink defining the point as the center of the state. This plaque would remain in its place for more than sixty years.

In 1974, the First Christian Church congregation purchased the Dockery house and it soon had new life as a parsonage. Visitors of Lewistown were now shown the parsonage and told of the town’s little tale.

In 1982, things took a twist about a mile east of the parsonage when ground was broken on Main Street for the expansion of the Yogo Inn to include a convention center and swimming pool. Chunks of earth were no sooner turned over when a workman swung his pickaxe and struck a boulder. To the surprise of many, a distressed gold mining pan rested on top of the rock and even more incredulous, the stone had been chiseled. A crude carving clearly illustrated an outline of Montana with an ‘x’ in the center. Further, next to the rock lay a buffalo horn fashioned into a time capsule. Inside the hollow horn was a surveyor’s compass, a coin, and a message dated February 12, 1912: “Good Friend Forbear To Disturb the Stone entombed in here. Blessed are they Who accept the Center Mark And to Hell with those Who would move this Rock.”  W.S.

Questions began to abound among the townsfolk who wondered who W.S. was and if his “mark” was more accurate than the surveyors. Coffee shop old timers pondered if the initials were those of Will Stafford, a surveyor for the Jawbone Railroad which reached Lewistown in 1903. 

Meanwhile, Yogo Inn owners and prominent businessmen rallied around W.S. and his mark. “What an incredible discovery,” they claimed. The old timers grumbled that the bruhaha had been staged ⎯ and poorly so, for that matter. In the words of Mary Jean Golden, “One day a group of guys building an addition to the community motel were sitting around drinking coffee. The next day they found a buffalo horn with what was almost a note from Lewis and Clark saying, ‘When Montana becomes a state, this is the center.’” Mary Jean and the old guard stuck by the story of the Dockery sink. Yet, the people at the Yogo Inn were undeterred and wishing to commemorate W.S.’s center mark adjacent to the brand-new swimming pool, they commissioned a tile mosaic with the words, “Montana’s Center – Lewistown.”

Then, in 1987 for reasons unknown, elders at the First Christian Church decided the center of Montana wasn’t under the parsonage sink after all. They placed Ray Dockery’s copper plaque in storage before scuttling the sink and razing the Dockery house. 

Eventually, the twenty-first century arrived, and with it, Montana State geographers in Lewistown. They roved around with their devices in hand and crunched numbers. In 2006, they revealed their data and upsetting news for Lewistown. Alas, the center mark wasn’t on First Christian Church ground; nor was it at the Yogo Inn. In fact, it wasn’t anywhere in Lewistown. 

Montana’s center had shifted yet again. The new site was determined to be in a pasture nine miles west of town. Mary Jean Golden had an explanation. She called the peculiar phenomenon, “state tectonics,” or Montana’s center mark stretching, sliding, or burping its way from under the Dockery house to the Yogo Inn to a spot of grass under the Big Sky. 

To this day, the Yogo Inn sticks by the W.S. version of the tale.