Community Bank celebrates a century in business
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Despite a century peppered with droughts, depressions, recessions, fires and even a bank robbery, Community Bank has survived and flourished.
“I would say it has always been run very conservatively,” Community Bank Board Member Debby Olsson McClenahan said.
McClenahan attributes the bank’s survival to its fiscally conservative management — even in its precarious beginning.
Unlike the rest of the country, the Roaring ‘20s affected Montana’s economy adversely.
From 1920 to 1924, nearly half of Montana’s 428 banks went out of business, McClenahan explained, and in 1924 Community Bank also came to the brink of closing.
But the bank’s then president, Andrew J. Brower and McClenahan’s grandfather, Harold Olsson, accepted a banking policy that was community based and prudent.
And today the bank’s motto remains the same.
“Big banks are run to be efficient and make money,” McClenahan said. “We’re run locally.”
Community bank serves its local customers and puts their interest first.
‘We don’t go to some computer in the sky,” McClenahan said.
They have a local loan committee and the bank remains sensitive to the community that they’ve served since the reservation opened.
In 1910 the Flathead Reservation opened to non-Indian settlers. Ronan promptly developed as a bustling community with a sawmill, café, flour shop, tailor shop, two livery stables, bottling works, millinery shop, three lumber yards, a motion picture house, two real estate dealers, three blacksmith shops, a jewelry story, two pool halls, a law office, a newspaper and Methodist and Catholic churches.
Two banks opened their doors as well: Ronan State Bank, which was later renamed Community Bank, and First National Bank.
In those days, two or three people ran the entire bank located on Main Street in Ronan.
Now with four locations and 70 employees, Community Bank is a far cry from where it was 100 years ago, but the same philosophy applies — to assist people and to invest in the community and in its future.
In the past 50 years, banking transformed from a system where all checks were hand-filed and sorted to the automated system in use today.
With a digital system in place, the tasks inside the bank have changed but the employees have not.
“We feel really lucky,” McClenahan said. “People stay and work for the bank for a long time. There isn’t much turnover.”
The bank recently honored 25 employees who’ve been with the bank for 25 years or more.
And the people are what it’s really about, McClenahan explained.
“You need to know what the hopes and dreams of the people are,” she added.
Through the good times and the bad, Community Bank has remained a steady employer for local people, invested in community members’ lives and futures and sponsored numerous community events, fundraisers and scholarships.
