For Sale: The Only Bar in a 14-Person Montana Town | Hacker News Reader

For Sale: The Only Bar in a 14-Person Montana Town

atlasobscura.com

96 pointsobjections89 comments

I took a trip to Eastern Montana, to a 'town' of about 20 people. Turned out the local pastor was from my home town 5 states away.

It's such a different way of living - and difficult to imagine without actually going there and experiencing it.

Wow, I have lived here in Montana for 33 years and I have never heard of Ingomar. Don't let the article fool you. There are probably at least 100-200 other similar bars for around the same price in towns which are relatively close to the same size.

I grew up in North Dakota, this bar sounds like a lot of small town bars I grew up around. I'm sure you're right on them being a dime a dozen, our "local" aka 20 minute drive away bar had unpaved roads and also yes did have spots for the horses.

Asking price seems rather high. I'm sure you could find an abandoned building in Montana and turn it into a bar for far less than $225k.

Your paying for the business + history

I gotta assume in this case you're more paying for the history.. can't imagine there's as lot of business with 13 residents and nearest city being 45 minutes away.

It sounds like they do fine; only beer in 100 miles is a pretty good business proposition. They also go through 1200 pounds of pinto beans a year, so somebody's buying food there.

That's about 3.5 pounds of beans a day. Which would make maybe 4 or so gallons of soup, that's 512fl oz or 32 16oz portions.

1200 lbs a year, assuming a half pound per serving, is only 2400 servings a year, or about six a day. I can't imagine six bowls of beans does much to pay the bills even in rural Montana.

A half pound of beans is an awful lot for a serving.

Really? The recipes I found seemed to use 3 1lb cans of beans per 4 people. That's 3/4 lb of beans per person. Also, this is Montana, they don't shy from larger portions, a pound a person wouldn't surprise me.

Just because the town only has 14 residents doesn't mean there's nobody passing through or otherwise visiting.

Looks like a corral for rodeo, cattle auction, county fair, etc. next door just south of the bar. Appears to be used.

History doesn't pay the bills when you're in the middle of nowhere. Also, I'm sure all the other abandoned buildings around here have stories.

Not really. You'd really just be paying for the history.

Spending a quarter million dollars on a four wood (edit: brick) walls and a door in a podunk Montana town that is about a 100 mile drive to the nearest town isn't a business purchase. You likely wouldn't recoup the cost in your lifetime.

> Spending a quarter million dollars on a four wood walls and a door in a podunk Montana town that is about a 100 mile drive to the nearest town

From the OP:

> The Jersey Lilly was the town’s first brick building, built in 1914 as the first bank of a very different Ingomar.

> The nearest town, Forsyth, is “only” 44 miles away. “That’s really close in Montana, trust me.”

If you want to write a dismissive comment, go ahead, but at least get the facts straight (which were clearly stated in the first three paragraphs of the OP).

I mean, he's got a point. Forsyth has less than 2000 people in it. As someone who used to live in Montana, the nearest town worth mentioning is Billings which is 111 miles away, and the nearest town worth really going to is Missoula which is 371 miles.

It all depends on your point of view. I have a nephew who lives outside of Roy, population 108. He grew up in central South Dakota but moved to Montana because South Dakota was getting way too crowded.

Ha! It is crazy how different perspectives can be depending on where you're from. When I moved up to Montana in 2011 they had just broken 1,000,000 population for the first time in the state's history and all the locals were talking about how crazy it was. Meanwhile I also thought it was crazy, because I had just moved from a place where there were a million people within five miles of me. A quick google shows that Montana still has just one area code - 406 - for the entire state.

I went to grades 1 to 8 at a rural one room school house with about a dozen other kids. My high school was about 600 students. Then I went to a university with about 20,000. Adjustment in that direction is not easy either.

I wonder how my mother did it: she was a one room school teacher during the Depression and moved to Manhattan for WW II after getting divorced (where she met and married my father).

I have relatives in the Dakotas who get pissed at traffic lights in general. As in, they live in a county without a single traffic light.

There unfortunately is a very bad habit of some drivers in these areas of blowing stop signs because they are used to so little traffic/people in general. But obviously the consequences can be horrible (see Bill Janklow, ex-South Dakota governor who then later became an ex-con).

Boseman

Forsyth itself has a population of under 2,000. Barely a town, if even.

Having lived in Montana for 2 years myself, I don't consider Forsyth a town worth noting. Billings is the closest town that has a decent population, and it's 110 miles away by car.

Brick or wood (fixed my original comment for ya), my point was it's a simple building in a tiny "town". It's not worth the money as a business purchase, but would be a pleasure buy.

Not sure why my comment needed to be pedantically torn apart.

Because IF you are going to be sarcastically dismissive you ought to at least get the details right.

I don't think the details are critical to their point though. The fact that it's a brick building with backstory doesn't immediately turn it into a sound business decision.

What was sarcastic about their remark? I had no issue with it and your reaction surprises me.

In Montana, you're paying for the liquor license. It's not uncommon to see hole-in-the-wall bars in 2000 person towns go for $1 million. They are quota-ed and similar to the NYC taxi medallion system.

This is correct. On the other hand since tasting rooms can operate without a liquor license it creates a real advantage for small brewereries etc. My town of 5000 has two mircobreweries, a distillery and a cidery and Montana ranks second (IIRC) in breweries per capata.

Plus all the really cool bars are out in the middle of the mountains nowhere near a town.

True story. I was born in Ennis, population single digits thousands. They have a brewery and distillery.

Does that actually recoup? Or are they buying those licenses to use in more populated areas? (curious if they are tied to the town or not)

If I remember correctly, it depends on when and by what authority they were issued. I think some are specific to a town whereas others extend to the whole county.

As with Uber and medallions, the increasing popularity of craft breweries able to operate with an inexpensive license has led to some big legislative battles. The Montana Tavern Association (MTA, liquor license holders) try to crush the craft breweries every legislative session. They have limited the taphouses to some extent: they can only serve four pints per person per day and they have to close at 8 PM. Also similar to Uber vs taxi drivers the general public likes the breweries and the MTA struggles to maintain a popular image while trying to legislate away erosion of their license values.

Is that in the USA? Sounds very unbelievable to me, here (in eastern EU) we demonstrate if people try to limit opening hours few days a year!

New Mexico is similar. Incorporated Towns and Cities as well as Counties can issue beer and wine licenses, a generally issue them frequently and cheaply, but hard liquor is only issues by the state there are limits, and they are transferrable, so the license itself can easily sell for a million depending on the license. Recent sales prices in NM: https://bit.ly/2YyzzWf (PDF)

Hmm. Well perhaps the price could have to do with the liquor license and the fact that that license could be used in another location?

I don't know that is the case here but that thought comes to mind. Could be geographic restrictions (county) but maybe not. County is about 9500 people.

http://www.mtrules.org/gateway/ruleno.asp?RN=42%2E12%2E209

Liquor licenses are definitely scarce. I remember hearing one for Missoula, MT being sold for $750K. It's also a huge issue for the brewery/winery/distillery market. Old entrenched interests don't like our breweries taking their customers even if they close before 8PM.

Hopefully all those 14 patrons are loyal and healthy and plan to continue frequenting the establishment.

as if they had plethora of other entertainment options to choose from ...

Montana is not particularly inexpensive. A lot of wealth there living outside a spotlight. Note how well kept the bar interior appears in the photos.

This sounds like the bar equivalent of the "I could build Twitter in my basement in a weekend" trope that HN is so fond of.

For real, buying this kind of business in Montana is extremely risky. I lived for many years in an area that's very popular with tourist/sportsmen including quite a few famous Hollywood types. There are many lakes with lodges around there. My family got to know many people who would by a place like that and it ruined many of their lives. Divorces, bankruptcies, the whole gamut. It's very hard.

These always look like fun, interesting deals to outsiders but unless you have someone with local knowledge, I wouldn’t trust any of them.

I've always wondered about the data missing in Google Maps. For instance, when you go to Ingomar, MT and look at street view, the car got to the entrance of the town and the data just stops.

https://goo.gl/maps/WVTAChPsBUiRjnoX9

Did the camera die? Did the car get a flat? Did someone forget to turn something on?

It was them.

Maybe they stopped at the bar and got inebriated and forgot to complete their mission :)

Slightly related, I was surprised to learn how much Google still relies on satellite data for mapping roads. I found a road (pretty isolated, but there were occupied houses on it) less than an hour from Mountain View that, according to Google Maps, didn't exist (it just ended in front of the woods according to Google - I went for a few miles before Google was able to locate me on a road again).

I'm not surprised this is their approach; I am surprised that this many years later a street so close to their headquarters could still be invisible to them.

A weird thing about the of rural Montana that I grew up in is that Google maps has names of places that no one there uses and then they don't have names that are popularly known.

Holy cow is that area desolate. Gotta take a special type of person to want to pony up and buy this place.

Native Montanan speaking here. I think the Montana equivalent to YC's "build something people want" is "build bars where people live." To do the opposite makes for a lot of slow afternoons.

If this tickles your fancy, there are plenty of Australian outback pubs on the market for similar prices:

https://www.commercialrealestate.com.au/news/six-classic-aus...

"Behind one end of the bar sits Jefferson Peters, octopus, with a sixshooter on each side of him, ready to make change or corpses as the case may be. There are three bartenders; and on the wall is a ten foot sign reading: 'All Drinks One Dollar.' Andy sits on the safe in his neat blue suit and gold-banded cigar, on the lookout for emergencies. The town marshal is there with two deputies to keep order, having been promised free drinks by the trust.

"Well, sir, it took Bird City just ten minutes to realize that it was in a cage. We expected trouble; but there wasn't any. The citizens saw that we had 'em. The nearest railroad was thirty miles away; and it would be two weeks at least before the river would be fordable. So they began to cuss, amiable, and throw down dollars on the bar till it sounded like a selection on the xylophone.

(The Octopus Marooned by O. Henry)

With the onset of Starlink, I expect such locations could experience a population boom. With urban housing prices skyrocketing (demand exceeding supply = bidding war), many are discovering the only thing they need to live where they actually want to is reliable high-speed low-latency internet. The land is cheap ($150,000 for 321 acres in Ingomar, Montana), the region attractive (drove around there this summer, very nice), just need a good data feed. Leverage it right, and that old bar could spawn a happenin' site for remote workers.

Not in Eastern Montana, I don't think. It's a pretty depressing place to live. All the mountains and beautiful wilderness that come to mind when you think of Montana are about 300 miles west. All that's really out in the east is flat grassland, meth, and Indian reservations.

The state has the highest suicide rate in the nation.

Go back during winter and see if you feel the same way XD

Right this minute you could find very fast internet (fiber) in rural areas with very inexpensive housing. I have a relatives in the Dakotas & Nebraska with better internet than I have in Denver. Some of them live in town and some of them live in the country. A lot of it seems to depend on local government having the drive to get rural access funds from the FCC.

As another said, eastern Montana could be brutal if its not something you are used to. There are extremely hot and extremely cold days (in the -30s degrees F) possible. It will be really windy and really brown (its very dry) for much of the year. You might also be shocked by how much some people drink/use other substances and how they get around when incapacitated. (There is no Lyft/Uber). There will not be a lot of young singles around, either.

I personally don't think there will be a big boom because of Starlink for housing. At the end of the day, internet is just a small factor in what makes a place desirable to live. Climate, distance to city/airport, local bars & restaurants, scenic beauty, and local activities all factor a lot, too.

> It will be really windy and really brown (its very dry) for much of the year.

Remember playing soccer with a guy from Montana. We were playing on a field in the Fall that was basically all dead, yellow grass. He used to say. "Dude, I'm from Montana, this is considered LUSH"

> "Dude, I'm from Montana, this is considered LUSH"

Good old prarie grass, green after it rains in June. Don't put a flame near or you'll start a wild fire brown the rest of the summer.

I think the bigger problem is getting more companies to allow fully remote employees, internet connectivity is only a small part of the issue.

I think people care about food more than they care about internet. There are small towns that can't even keep grocery stores running (there was an article about it on HN recently).

While not Montana, I can get gigabit internet service [~10-30ms latency to Google servers] on my farm. I like it here, but I don't see the masses flocking to live here because of the internet service.

What are the taxes to live in this area? A colleague has a small farm in West Virginia and she told me she pays about half of her net income in taxes for the farm. I think she earns around $60,000.

Reminds me of this little piece of news from today. They are selling a small Spanish village using Wallapop, which is an app that could be considered a local version of Craigslist. The price: €90M

https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20191209/472142739583/vent...

Montana has some odd liquor laws, so that's likely the largest reason for the price. There's a quota system in incorporated cities and counties, meaning supply doesn't hit demand inflating prices. The system should be done away with, but alas.

Looks like it also comes with a sweet little penthouse: http://www.jerseylillysaloon.com/whiskey-row-penthouse.html

My bad, can't edit the above comment but I seem to have mistaken it for another saloon in Arizona.

I'd be afraid my best customers would be alcoholics and I'd feel guilty in running them off.

It'd be hard to earn a living off 13 other people.

well, for sure the owner would have town's monopoly in the bar business.

Monopoly? So... do we need to split up the bar, for a fair market?

The problem is not a monopoly, but abuse of a monopoly in a way that stops competition. If the bar owner started charging $100/beer and then forcefully stopped anyone else from opening a bar, that’d need to be broken up for a fair market. Short of that, you don’t have an issue

Do they accept REMOTE employees?

If you move there to run the bar, you'd be in a remote town and therefore I think "REMOTE employee" would be an apt title. So... yes?

It would be fun if the bar is run by remote controlled robots, serving you beer at 10pm - maybe someone who just work up the other side of the world is controlling the robot!

This place isn't just in the middle of nowhere, it's in Eastern Montana, not even the nice part of Montana (the west).

This place shouldn't exist. A mildly interesting story, but small town Montana is a rough existence even if you live in pretty part.

I would not recommend anyone buying this place unless you don't mind throwing away $200k on it.

Edit: All the down votes are coming from people who have never been to Eastern Montana. I have. Multiple times. I lived in Montana. Eastern Montana has nice, polite people, but it's got almost nothing going for it economically other than oil.

There is a reason why people (especially young people) are leaving Eastern Montana for the past several decades.

You're not joking, I checked streetview and its one of the few places I've seen in the developed world where the streetview car didn't bother leaving main street and just GTFO.

Edit: hey sorry if I come across as offensive, I'm from a small city and like living in quiet places.

I wonder just how strange and alien most locals would find the above comment about their town.

Not trying to be offensive here, I just find the thought of using Google Street View coverage as any kind of metric for such a place so... jarring.

It's a fascinating comment, in a few ways. I can say I have never been somewhere and wondered 'would a Google streetmap car come here', I don't think it works in that way. The closest similar judgement I can relate to is being somewhere without network coverage. I don't really want to be there, it's weird and makes me think about how different it would be to live somewhere with no coverage. So perhaps then, it's simply noticing the absence of something we thought if as ubiquitous. A mental model, revealed as wrong, or distorted. Jarring is a good term for that too.

It looks like it would have taken the driver perhaps 10 minutes to negotiate the town, significantly improving the imagery. I would be interested to know how Google determines what should and shouldn't be included at locations such as these.

I've made a list of similar 'one-horse'-type towns to visit during a future one-in-a-lifetime trip around my home country (Australia). Growing up in a country town there (population roughly 25k at that time), things are indeed different than in the capital cities, and I imagine even 'more different' the smaller the population.

Please don't cross into regional slurs. "This place shouldn't exist" is a step into that, and we need users not to go there here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I was born in Montana. I lived in Montana. That restaurant probably hasn't made a profit in 30 years and they are asking $250k for it.

I understand, and had a feeling that that was where you were coming from. Unfortunately, though, the internet doesn't distinguish between regional (or ethnic or other) slurs made by the people from that place (or group) vs. the garden-variety nasty sort—so the burden is on you to disambiguate. Otherwise we end up with the same kind of flamewar either way.

1) I was referring to the restaurant. 2) I'm from Montana.

You should just apologize that you didn't understand my comment rather than try to over explain it.

It's true that by "this place shouldn't exist" I thought you were referring to more than just the restaurant.

The thing is, though, that the burden is on you to disambiguate, otherwise we end up with the same kind of flamewar. I don't think that's overexplaining at all. You didn't do it, so some explanation is necessary, and this is standard HN moderation. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

You are the one who started the flamewar by accusing me of something I didn't say. It was clear in my comment that every time I said "this place" I was referring to the restaurant. I used the phrase "this place" three times in my original comment, all three referring to the restaurant.

Just apologize for accusing me of something that I didn't do and I will move on.

Yep, once you get East of the Rockies there's really not much to see or do until you get to like...Minnesota.

It doesn't surprise me to learn that Montana has the highest suicide rate in the country.

It's about 60 miles east of the last tiny town discussed on HN [0]. Ingomar isn't _really_ much of a town, but it is a cultural waypoint. It's surrounded by historic farming/ranching communities and is within 50-60 miles of several more populous small towns. Driving 50-60 miles is a trivial venture in MT. When I was a kid growing up nearby, there were rodeos in Ingomar nearly every weekend during the summer. They pulled in a decent number of visitors (probably 100-200 or so), and the Jersey Lilly was, naturally, the busiest place in town. I believe they are still putting on the rodeos. It's not a huge amount of business, but probably enough to support a $200k price tag if you're looking for an unusual hobby/lifestyle in an area with a lot of western history. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21569610

Perfect place for witness protection gig?

Or for someone who broke bad a little too much.

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