Weeksville, MT

Weeksville is a census-designated place in Sanders County, Montana, about six miles northwest of Plains. The 2020 census counted 81 residents, but the place once had a much larger and much shorter-lived population. Weeksville grew in the early 1880s as Northern Pacific crews built the railroad along the Clark Fork River. Hundreds of Chinese railroad workers lived there while crews laid track and blasted through the surrounding country, and the camp served as a winter headquarters and supply point.

When the railroad was completed in 1883, Weeksville largely disappeared. University of Montana excavations later found artifacts connected to the Chinese workers, including a cooking wok, but no standing buildings remain from the railroad town. The present CDP is a rural Sanders County place tied to the forest, highway, and rail corridor near Plains. Weeksville’s story is therefore less about a surviving main street than about the people and labor that briefly gathered here to push a railroad through western Montana.