Pinesdale, MT

Pinesdale is a Ravalli County town in the Bitterroot Valley, about three miles west of Hamilton. It was founded in the early 1960s by members of the Apostolic United Brethren, a Mormon fundamentalist group that wanted a place to live communally and practice its faith outside the mainstream LDS church; plural marriage is part of that history. The town incorporated in 1980, and its homes, school, and church grew around the community's religious organization.

Pinesdale's story is best told as a community with its own institutions and unresolved questions. Much of the original land was held by the breakaway group, and residents have more recently argued over land ownership, tithing, and how much control the church should retain. Pinesdale sits close to Hamilton and the Bitterroot Valley's larger work and service network, but it has never been just another subdivision. Its small-town identity comes from a particular religious founding, town-meeting government, and the difficult process of deciding what belongs to the community now.