The history of Deer Lodge
Deer Lodge's modern record centres on Conley Lake Road, where a mid-20th-century lake lodge gave way to the current Montana State Prison, built 1974-1979 to replace the city's old downtown penitentiary. Inmates arrived in September 1979, and the site has since seen executions, a deadly riot, and a 2025 pipe failure.
Conley Lake Road is the site of Montana State Prison, built between 1974 and 1979 to replace the state's old downtown Deer Lodge penitentiary. Inmates moved into this new facility in September 1979. It has since held executions in 1995 and 1998, survived a deadly 1991 riot, and endured a major pipe failure in October 2025.
A new prison replaces the old downtown fortress
Montana State Prison is the working men's prison the Montana Department of Corrections still runs today, built between 1974 and 1979. It replaced an older prison in downtown Deer Lodge, a sandstone fortress that had held Montana's convicts since 1871. That old prison had been plagued for decades by overcrowding and neglect. An inmate riot in 1959 ended with the Montana National Guard storming the walls after thirty-six hours. By the late 1970s, state officials decided the old building could not be fixed, and a new prison went up instead, about 3.5 miles west of town on what is now Conley Lake Road. In September 1979, on the old prison's 108th anniversary as a working penitentiary, the state moved its inmates out to this new site. The old building became a museum, and this one became the prison in use.
A fishing lake lost its public access to the prison
The prison on Conley Lake Road had its name waiting for it long before anyone broke ground. Conley Lake, and the road beside it, carried the name of Frank Conley, the warden who ran the old downtown prison from 1890 to 1921 and built much of it with inmate labor. Before the new prison fenced it off, the lake was a community spot, used for weddings, reunions, and fishing. Once the state moved its prisoners here in 1979, public access to the lake was cut off, though the Elks Lodge kept up an annual fishing outing there for years after.
Two men were executed inside these walls
Two men were put to death inside these walls in the years that followed. On May 10, 1995, Duncan McKenzie was executed by lethal injection, the first execution in Montana since 1943. Duncan McKenzie's last meal was steak, french fries, a salad, and orange sherbet. Almost three years later, on February 24, 1998, Terry Langford was executed the same way. Langford had been sent to death row for one killing, then killed a fellow inmate during a 1991 prison riot that left five dead. Langford declined to make a final statement before he died.
A pipe failure cut water to the whole prison
On October 10, 2025, pipes began leaking across the prison at six in the morning. The failure affected roughly 90 percent of the roughly 1,600 men held here. The Montana National Guard was called in to help manage water supply and set up temporary showers. Crews worked to find and fix the leaks as the state began a larger overhaul of the prison's aging water system.
Crews worked to restore water as the Guard stayed on
Crews traced the leaks through the prison's aging pipework over the following days, and the National Guard stayed on to keep water moving to cell blocks while permanent fixes went in. The episode became one more chapter in a facility that has run for close to half a century without the medieval stonework of its predecessor, but with the same job: holding the men Montana sentences to its care.
Montana State Prison still operates as the state's primary men's correctional facility, on the same ground above Conley Lake.
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