Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Eureka, MT

Eureka is a town in Lincoln County, Montana, in the Tobacco Valley on the Tobacco River, about nine miles south of the Canadian border.

The town was founded in the early 1880s under the name Deweyville, as settlers moved into one of the last corners of Montana to be developed in frontier times.

The surrounding Tobacco Plains took their name from a native tobacco that Kootenai people grew there, which early explorers observed; the explorer David Thompson traveled through the area in 1808.

Joseph Peltier built the first dwelling on the Eureka townsite in 1891, and the Great Northern Railway's arrival through the Tobacco Valley in 1904 spurred the modern town's growth.

Logging drove Eureka's early economy: the Eureka Lumber Company was founded in 1906 and operated for about 18 years, and a large sawmill anchored the town until it burned in 1923.

Eureka later became famous as the "Christmas Tree Capital of the World"; by 1948 it was shipping about 1.8 million Christmas trees a year in hundreds of railroad cars.

Local histories recount that when Lincoln County was created in 1909, Eureka actually won the county-seat election over Libby by 656 votes to 638, yet still failed to become the county seat.

President Harry S. Truman gave a whistle-stop campaign speech in Eureka on October 1, 1952.

The Tobacco Valley Historical Village, an open-air museum at the south end of town, preserves pioneer buildings, several of them rescued from the flooding caused by Libby Dam's Lake Koocanusa.

Every April since the late 1970s, Eureka has held the Tobacco Valley Rendezvous to commemorate David Thompson's visit to the valley.