Archie Bray Foundation Receives $13,000 Grant for Historic Campus Preservation
The Archie Bray's 19th-century blacksmith shop receives a $13,000 lifeline; without stabilization, original Western Clay tools risk loss before the public ever sees them.
A 19th-century blacksmith shop on the Archie Bray Foundation's Country Club Avenue campus is the target of a $13,000 preservation grant from the Foundation for Montana History, with funds earmarked to stabilize the structure and catalog its original tools before deterioration outpaces access.
The Bray, a nonprofit ceramic arts residency founded in 1951 on the former Western Clay Manufacturing Company site three miles west of downtown Helena, received the award as part of a statewide grant round in which the Foundation for Montana History is distributing more than $255,000 to communities across Montana. Other recipients in this cycle include the Powell County Museum and Arts Foundation for roof repair on the old Montana State Prison's Tower 7, the Beaverhead County Cemetery Board for a ground-penetrating radar survey of Centennial Valley cemeteries, and Butte Citizens for a preservation and revitalization app and website.
The blacksmith shop is one of more than 17 buildings across the Bray's 26-acre campus, a relic of the brickyard that supplied much of the brick used to construct downtown Helena in the late 19th century. The structure and the tools inside it anchor that industrial story on-site. Without stabilization funding, small cultural nonprofits routinely defer this kind of technically specialized work, and deferred work means structural failure and lost artifacts, not delayed schedules.
Once the stabilization and cataloging is complete, the Bray plans to open the blacksmith shop for public interpretation, adding a concrete destination to a campus already open for studio visits, kiln tours, and gallery access at 2915 Country Club Ave.
The $13,000 is modest against the scale of preservation needs, but targeted grants of this kind often determine whether a structure survives at all. The Foundation for Montana History has awarded more than $1.75 million to 336 recipients across 206 Montana communities since 2012. The Bray's blacksmith shop project is the kind of unglamorous, structural-first work that precedes any public programming; residents can watch for stabilization progress and a cataloging milestone as the foundation moves through its 75th anniversary year.
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