Marysville House (in Marysville ghost town)

The story

Drive twenty-five miles northwest of Helena into the gulches off Montana State Road 279, and the modern world evaporates into a scattering of weather-beaten timber frames and silent 19th-century churches. This was once Marysville, a wild boomtown fueled by Irish miner Thomas Cruse's ridiculously rich Drumlummon Mine. Today, fewer than a hundred people live among the remnants of Montana's former gold capital, but if you roll into town around dusk, you will find a surprisingly lively pocket of light at 153 Main Street.

The building holding the Marysville House didn't actually start its life in Marysville. In 1975, the owners flatbed-trucked an 1800s Great Northern railroad depot up from Silver City—a dead junction down the road that used to connect Helena to Great Falls and Fort Benton. They parked the depot on Main Street, converted the old wood-paneled freight and baggage room into a dining hall, and started throwing thick steaks onto the grill.

You are here to eat hand-cut ribeyes inside a relocated train station in a town with no remaining tracks. It is noisy, rustic, and utterly unpretentious. The staff like to point out that late at night, when the last diners have left and the gulch turns dead quiet, you can sometimes hear the faint blast of a steam train whistle rolling through the valley—a phantom locomotive searching for a depot that got stolen five decades ago.