Oswald Berg, Sr. was born in Castle, Montana on November 3, 1889 to Jakob Olsen and Martha Udro Berg. He attended local schools and graduated from high school in Meagher County. In 1915 he married Ingartha Thormodsgaard in Spokane, Washington and the couple afterwards established a sheep ranch in Lennep, Montana. They had four children, including Oswald J. Berg, Jr. who became a prolific Bozeman architect. In the latter years of his life Berg took an interest in local history and published an article on sheep shearing in the Harlowton Times newspaper and wrote another on the history of his birthplace, Castle, Montana. He died in Marinsdale, Montana in June, 1973.
"The History of Castle" is an essay by Oswald Berg tracing the development and demise of a silver mining town in Central Montana. Castle was established around 1882 when a prospector named H. H. Barnes discovered paying ore deposits in the mountains southwest of White Sulphur Springs. Within a few years the population grew into the thousands and the town had several newspapers and multiple businesses. However, the declining prince of silver in 1893, as well as the town's isolation, doomed Castle and by the turn of the century only a handful of residents remained. In 1967 Oswald Berg wrote a history of the town and read his essay into a tape recorder. The collection includes: the tape of that Castle history essay and a transcription with extensive corrections that may have been produced by library personnel; copy photographic prints of Castle and area mines, 1890-1948, Lennep, 1900, and the Berg family; a newspaper clipping of Berg's essay on the Harlowton, Montana sheep shearing operation in the early years of the twentieth century.
This collection is open for research.
An audiotape and transcription of an essay on the history of Castle, Montana, along with copy photographs of the town and Berg family, were donated to the Montana State University Library in 1966 by Oswald Berg, Sr.
This collection was processed 2018 June 7