Volunteers maintain highway fatality markers

Normally, American Legion Post 52 in Thompson Falls works on the white crosses along the roads and highways once a year, and that was in mid May. However, the man in charge of the American Legion Highway Fatality Marker Program said that a handful of the markers along Highway 200 were the wrong size and needed to be switched out.

Last week, Post Commander Bill Beck of Plains spent nearly two hours on the road for a 10-minute job of replacing one of the crosses and plans to get the other four done in the next few weeks. Post 52 is one of several posts in the state to be involved in the American Legion Highway Fatality Marker Program, which started more than 65 years ago.

Post 52 is responsible for about 55 crosses from Panorama Road northwest of Plains to the Idaho border along Highway 200, about 50 miles, and up Prospect Creek, Highway 471 to the Idaho border, just over 20 miles. The cross at Whitepine that Beck replaced was the correct height and overall size, but the individual metal cross slabs were only 2.5 inches wide and are supposed to be 4 inches. In addition, the red post was a metal fence post and not as sturdy as the post that is supposed to hold the cross, said Beck, who last week also replaced two markers about six miles west of Plains that are normally under the jurisdiction of American Legion Post 129 in Paradise.

The American Legion Highway Fatality Marker Program is a volunteer program and most of the Legion posts in Montana participate in the program, according to Missoula resident Jim Kelly, who is the statewide coordinator of the program. It was Kelly who noticed recently that a handful of the crosses in Sanders County were not the right specifications and asked the Thompson Falls post members to replace them. Beck also gave the new crosses a fresh coat of white paint. Kelly also recently erected a new cross in Whitepine, where an accident took the lives of a father and son in the mid 1960s. The family had noticed that there was no marker where they had died and notified the Legion to get one placed.

"The crosses are not a memorial to the person who died there; it's supposed to show where a person or persons died at that site," said Beck, who said they periodically remove flowers and other paraphernalia from the crosses. The idea is for the crosses to be highly visible from the highway to motorists and if a cross is covered with materials, it defeats the purposes, said Kelly. "We allow people to put things on the post because we're sensitive to the grief that a family goes through, but not on the cross itself," he added.

Beck has been involved in the program with Post 52 for about four years. According to Kelly, there are more than 2,500 cross markers throughout Montana. The Paradise post and a Legion Post 106 in St. Ignatius cover the other nearly 40 markers in Sanders County. The majority of the crosses are erected following a highway fatality at or near that spot, but two years ago Kelly placed a cross west of Thompson Falls for a father and son who both perished in the mid 1960s and had been overlooked until the family notified the Legion.