A history of Three Forks,
then and now
Postcards, papers and photographs of Three Forks from public archives, woven together by decade. Neighbors fill in the gaps.
The story
from WikipediaRead it all ↗The three rivers, west to east, were named by Meriwether Lewis in late July 1805 for President Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of State James Madison, and Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin which was in the times the genesis of a mild controversy and eventually spawned a modern-day geographical controversy—in both cases regarding length comparisons between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. Today the two confluences are incorporated inside Missouri Headwaters State Park, which is also a U.S. National Historic Landmark.
The Lewis and Clark expedition visited the site on July 28, 1805. Meriwether Lewis in his journal entry wrote:
Text from Wikipedia, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0.
Timeline
built from the dates on the items belowFinish Three Forks’s story
Most archives stop around 1920. The photos from after that are in family albums, not libraries.
3 of 10 decades since 1900 have photos 🔁Retake an old viewPanorama Of, 1909: stand where they stood+15 📦Share a family photoSign in to add one+10Famous people from Three Forks
See all 1 →Three Forks, decade by decade
1990s
Then & now
No then-and-now pairs yet. Take a photo from the same spot as Panorama Of (1909) and it appears here side by side.
🔁 Retake this view · +15Historic places
National Register · via Wikidata
From Wikimedia Commons (8), the Library of Congress (3) and the National Register (1). Images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.