Re-opening Soon

Suzanne HAckett-Morgan tells us why she bought the Jersey Lilly.

The Jersey Lilly was the town’s first brick building, built in 1914 as the first bank of a very different Ingomar. Once a major hub of sheep-shearing, Ingomar exported 2 million pounds of wool annually, employing and housing an unthinkable 600 residents. A lightning fire in 1921 razed every building in the promising yet flammable frontier town, except the brick-built bank. The ensuing Great Depression quickly shuttered the only surviving business, scattering the remainder of Ingomar’s residents to the winds of the Great Plains until only a handful of sheepherders remained.

Perhaps no town needed a drink after Prohibition more than Ingomar. In 1933, the abandoned bank reopened as the Oasis Bar. It still had the original pressed tin ceilings, bank vaults, and cement outlines from the bank-teller windows, but a dazzling new cherry-wood back bar made it a refined watering hole. Shipped up the Missouri River from St. Louis, the fixture was scratched up a bit in the truck bed of a Model T on its way to Ingomar, but it still frames the bar to this day. “I could sit and look at that piece of wood for hours,” says Nygren.

Seward renamed the bar “Jersey Lilly,” after the famously buxom 19th-century British film star. He brought a bean soup (not chili) recipe from Texas that is still served. “Our beans are very special. Internationally famous, they are,” Bob’s son Bill told David Isay in an interview for Holding On, a photo-book that pays tribute to the unsung heroes of America’s working class. (Photographer Harvey Wang recalls his first impression of Ingomar over the phone: “I’d never seen tumbleweed before, but there was literally tumbleweed blowing all through town.”) When pressed for the secret to the signature bean recipe, Nygren says, “If I told ya, I’d have to kill ya! Just kidding. It’s the secret spices.” Whatever’s in it, the Jersey Lillly today goes through 1,200 pounds of pinto beans annually.

Bill Seward developed a singular snack that met the needs of the town’s sheepherders. Sheepherder’s Hors D’Oeuvres—a pile of saltine crackers, cheddar cheese, orange slices, and raw onion—stay fresh without refrigeration. “You stick it all in your mouth one bite, just like an old hound dog eating hot cakes,” Seward told Isay. “Don’t taste a thing like you thought it would, do it?” The orange takes the edge off of the onion, making for a somehow inimitable flavor profile.

The bar slowly amassed mounted game heads and antlers as hunting grew popular in the region. Today, a stuffed jackalope mounts the cherrywood barback, and a moose head hangs with a cigarette in his mouth (“I shot him when he stopped for a smoke,” Bill would famously tell guests).June Nygren’s favorite is a buffalo head that keeps watch over the bar’s telephone booth. “He was raised by the former owner, but got mean and they had to put him down,” she says. “Now I decorate him for every holiday.” He recently exchanged a Pilgrim top hat for an undersized Santa hat.

As the only social venue in town for nearly a century, the Jersey Lilly has hosted countless birthday parties, graduation parties, weddings, and anniversaries for area residents. (Nygren refers to anyone within 100 miles as a “local.”) The Bill Seward Thanksgiving Day Feast hosts Great Plains sheepherders and cowhands who have nowhere to go for the holiday. They also host an annual British Tea Party, where Montanans flock to the bar to sip tea and eat cucumber sandwiches in Victorian garb.

The public restrooms are outhouses—last place in the state of Montana that still has them. Indeed, there’s no indoor plumbing other than the sinks, and their spot on the National Register of Historic Places shields the historic latrines, today labelled “Heifer Pen” and “Bull Pen,” respectively.

Deaf to the cacophony of the modern world, the streets of Ingomar remain unpaved, the only bar in town standing idly by.

“It’s a step back in time. It’s a place where cowboys still exist”