Vance Lodge

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.

From the record

“Vance Lodge is a historic homestead located approximately half a mile northwest of Polebridge, Montana, on the north side of the Polebridge Loop Road in Flathead County. Built in 1920 by Andrew "Andy" Vance, the lodge is a significant example of early 20th-century frontier settlement and recreational development in the North Fork Valley, near the western edge of Glacier National Park.”
Wikipedia article Vance Lodge, CC BY-SA 4.0.

One of 168 National Register listings published here for Flathead County · listed in 1994 · category: Building.

Sources: the Wikipedia article · the case file at the National Archives · the National Register database, National Park Service

The listing

Address. Polebridge Loop Rd. N side, about 0.5 mi. NW of Polebridge, Polebridge, 59928
When was it listed? December 1994
Category. building
Census division. Columbia Falls
National Register reference number. 94001505 - the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.

Fires near this property

42 since 1992

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The federal wildfire occurrence database lists 42 fires within 5 miles of Vance Lodge between 1992 and 2020, burning about 12 acres in total. 34 started naturally. 3 were recorded as arson. Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.

Reported cause	Fires
Natural	34
Arson/incendiarism	3
Debris and open burning	3
Smoking	1
Recreation and ceremony	1

The most recent of them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service that recorded it.

Date	Cause	Size	Reported by	Name on the report
6 September 1997	Natural	under an acre	Glacier National Park	COVEY
25 September 2008	Natural	under an acre	Glacier National Park	GUEST RANCH FIRE
23 September 1999	Recreation and ceremony	4.0 acres	Flathead National Forest	VANDERSCHAF
12 September 1995	Natural	under an acre	Glacier National Park	QUARTZ RDG
9 August 2006	Natural	under an acre	Glacier National Park	MUD LAKE
9 August 2006	Natural	under an acre	Flathead National Forest	HAWK CREEK
8 August 2009	Natural	under an acre	Glacier National Park	QUARTZ RIDGE
7 August 2017	Natural	under an acre	Glacier National Park	BIG PRAIRIE

Every fire recorded in Flathead County

Storms near this property

3 since 1996

Regional context, not property-specific evidence. The National Weather Service names Polebridge, the town this property stands in, in 3 storm reports between 1996 and 2006: 2 hail, 1 flood. No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date opens the federal record of that event.

When	Event	Place named	Harm	What the report says
June 2006	Flood	Polebridge	-	no account filed
June 2004	Hail	Polebridge	-	no account filed
July 1996	Hail	Polebridge	-	no account filed

Every storm recorded in Flathead County

Map coverage status

No historic map-sheet match is published for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary. Browse the county's mapped places while that work is pending.

Listed places nearby

6 within 8 miles

Other National Register properties close enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties to their map sheets.

Property	Distance	Listed
Polebridge Ranger Station Historic District	0.7 miles	1986
W. L. Adair General Mercantile Historic District	1.1 miles	1986
Bowman Lake Road	1.3 miles	1996
Johnnie Walsh's Guest Lodge	2.2 miles	1988
William Raftery Homestead	2.2 miles	1988
Anton Schoenberger Homestead	2.2 miles	1988

Sources for this property

National Archives record	The nomination case file for reference 94001505 in Record Group 79.
Wikipedia article	Community-written account of this property, licensed CC BY-SA.
Flathead County	All 168 listed properties in this county.

Provenance

Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.