Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Troy, MT

Troy is an incorporated city in Lincoln County, in Montana's northwestern corner, about 12 miles from the Idaho border.

At roughly 1,900 feet above sea level, Troy sits at the lowest elevation of any community in Montana.

The population was 797 at the 2020 census, down from 938 in 2010; at the 2010 census the city had 454 households.

The Troy area was inhabited by the Kutenai and other Interior Salish peoples, and later the Piegan Blackfeet, long before miners arrived in the 1880s.

Troy was laid out in 1892, when surveyor William O'Brien renamed the mining camp of Lake City, and it boomed after the Great Northern Railway chose the site for a freight division yard.

In its wildest years Troy had fifteen saloons and two dance halls, but the railroad moved its terminal away in 1926, fires destroyed the concentrator in 1927 and a sawmill in 1928, and the population fell from about 1,000 in the mid-1920s to 498 by the 1930 census.

Troy was drawn into the Libby vermiculite asbestos disaster: contamination from the Libby mines put the area on the EPA's Superfund National Priorities List in 2002, and in 2009 the EPA declared a public health emergency there, the first in the agency's history; area cleanup was completed by 2018 and oversight passed to the Montana Department of Environmental Quality in 2020.

The Troy Mine, a silver and copper mine northwest of town that was one of the area's major employers, closed in 2015.

Scenes for the films The River Wild (1994) and The Revenant (2015) were shot at nearby Kootenai Falls on the Kootenai River.

The Lincoln Theatre, which opened in 1924 and was remodeled in 1994, is a downtown landmark, and both the Troy Jail and the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Bridge were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.