Biographical Sketches

WILLIAM T. SWEET, SR.

WILLIAM T. SWEET, SR., was one of the very first settlers at Boulder, conducted its first store, and in many ways was a notable Montana pioneer.  He was born at Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1838, son of a Baptist minister, and of an ancestry that came originally from Wales and became established in America during the very early colonial period.  William T. Sweet, Sr., was reared and educated in Southern Ohio, and May 28, 1862, enlisted as a private in Company B of the Eighty-Seventh Ohio Infantry.  He was taken prisoner and paroled September 28, 1862.  Afterwards he served eighteen months in the navy on the gunboat Gazelle and eventually enlisted in Company F of the One Hundred and Ninety-Second Ohio Regiment and remained with that command until the close of the war.  He proved a brave and gallant soldier and was in the battle of Gettysburgh and many other historic campaigns of the war.

As is usually the case after any great conflict he with so many others was not content with the restricted conditions of his former life and sought adventure in the then Far West.  He started for Montana in 1866, coming by way of St. Louis and up the Missouri River, being six weeks making the trip from St. Louis to Fort Benton.  For the first six months in Montana Territory he worked for Col Charles Broadwater, driving a bull team from Fort Benton to Helena.  In 1867 he opened a general store at the old Town of Boulder under the firm name of Sweet & Higley.  He owned the land where the Town of Boulder now stands, and platted and laid out the original townsite.  He kept a station for stages and trading outfits, and his was the leading business concern of the place for a number of years.  Subsequently he embarked in the stock raising industry and became a rancher on an extensive scale.  His various occupations made him a prominent figure and he was instrumental in organizing the Old Settlers' Club, of which he remained a member until his death.  A democrat in politics, he was elected on his party ticket county treasurer, clerk of the District Court, and for a number of years was also justice of the peace.  He died in Boulder in 1917, having lived retired for several years.  Both as a Mason and as a member of the Episcopal Church he lived up to high ideals and was a very fine man in every respect.

At Boulder, in 1868, he married Emily Iola Cook, who was born at Kalamazoo, Michigan, in 1840, and died at Boulder, Montana, in 1897.  Her parents, Capt. and Mrs. Hiram Cook, were also pioneers who came to Montana after the close of the Civil War by way of St. Louis and the river route to Fort Benton.

Eight children were born to William T. Sweet and wife: Nellie, who married Frank Bernatz, a farmer and postmaster of Dixon, Montana, where she died in 1910; Chester W., who lives at Bozeman and is manager of the Montana Flour Mills Company and mayor of that city; Ralph W., who is a mining engineer at Tonopah, Nevada; Blanche E., who died at Boulder in 1905, the wife of B. F. Beckwith, now a salesman for the National Wholesale Grocery Company, living at Seattle, Washington; Mary, who married P. P. Roberts, a contractor and builder at Butte; William T. Jr., whose record follows; Shelby C., associated with his brother in the wholesale fruit and produce business at Butte; and Catherine, who married E. J. Finnerty, foreman of the Jones Fruit Company at Butte.

Source: Excerpts from the book, Montana: It's Story and Biography, volume II, edited by Tom Stout, published in 1921; located on the website, Hathitrust Digital Library (http://www.hathitrust.org), accessed 1 June 2022.

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