Hamilton's Store at West Thumb

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The log store at West Thumb, looking northwest. A survey photograph of July 1983. Jet Lowe, Historic American Buildings Survey. Library of Congress.

A general store and gas pump on the shore of Yellowstone Lake, at the place called West Thumb, where the road came down out of the trees and everybody stopped. West Thumb is a bay shaped like a thumbprint pressed into the west side of the lake, and it sits on top of a geyser basin — hot springs steaming right at the waterline, pools the color of bottle glass a few steps from the beach. For most of the twentieth century it was also a small settlement: a store, a service station, cabins, a place to sleep. Travelers coming through the park needed groceries, film, gasoline, and somewhere to stand around. Hamilton's Stores ran the retail side of Yellowstone for generations, and the buildings they put up were meant to look like they had grown there — log, shingle, deep porch, big stone chimney. The National Park Service called that style rustic and eventually made it a rule. The idea was that a building in a national park should apologize for itself. Then the park changed its mind about West Thumb. Having a village sitting on a live thermal basin was bad for the basin and bad for the people, and the developed area was pulled out. What is at West Thumb today is a boardwalk over the hot springs and a view across the lake. The store, the pumps, the whole small town of it — that is what the survey photographs are for. Somebody worked a summer behind that counter. Somebody's family pulled in at that pump on a trip that got talked about for the next forty years. If that was you, or your parents, or a photograph in a shoebox with a station wagon in front of it, this page would like to have it. Photographs: Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS WY-124 (call number HABS WYO,20-THUW), Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain.