Shelby Promoter
The Shelby Promoter is a weekly newspaper serving Shelby, Montana, the county seat of Toole County, and the surrounding Hi-Line country of north-central Montana. Directories describe it as providing local, weekly news since 1912, which makes it one of the older community newspapers on Montana's northern tier. From its office in a railroad town that once gambled its future on a world heavyweight boxing championship, the Promoter has covered oil booms and busts, wheat harvests in the Golden Triangle, county government, school sports and the everyday record of births, marriages and deaths in Toole County.
The Promoter's modern history is closely intertwined with two Montana newspaper families. The Kavanagh family owned and operated it for a century, from October 1922 until March 2022, when Brian and LeAnne Kavanagh sold it — together with the Cut Bank Pioneer Press, the Browning Glacier Reporter and The Valierian — to Jesse and Lloyd Mullen of Ponderosa Publications, affiliated with the Mullen Newspaper Company. It continues to publish in print and online at shelbypromoter.com as part of that Montana-owned group.
Early Shelby newspapers and the Promoter's beginnings
Shelby had newspapers almost as soon as it had streets. The Shelby News appeared in 1900–1901 and again in 1910–1915, and the Shelby Independent published in the first years of the 1900s, reflecting how important a printing press was to a new railroad settlement competing for settlers and investment. The Promoter emerged in this environment in the early 1910s; media directories date its weekly service to 1912, and the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection holds Shelby Promoter issues from 1918 to 1930, a run that captures the town's most dramatic decade.
Those early issues chronicled a community transforming itself. Shelby began as a railroad station established around 1892 at the junction of the Great Northern Railway and the Great Falls and Canada Railway, named for Peter O. Shelby, general manager of the Montana Central Railway. Oil discovered near Shelby in 1922 suddenly made the prairie town dream of becoming, in the phrase of the day, the Tulsa of the West — and the Promoter was there to record both the dream and what followed.
The 1923 Dempsey–Gibbons fight
No event defines old Shelby like the heavyweight championship fight of July 4, 1923. Local promoters, led by the mayor's son, persuaded Jack Dempsey — then the most famous athlete in America — to defend his world title in Shelby against Tommy Gibbons. Dempsey's manager, Jack "Doc" Kearns, drove a hard bargain: a guaranteed $300,000, payable in instalments before the fight. The town built an arena the size of a football field on the prairie, expecting tens of thousands of visitors.
Instead, doubts about whether the final payment would be made caused would-be spectators to cancel their train reservations. Only 7,702 paying customers watched Dempsey win a fifteen-round unanimous decision, while an estimated 13,000 more saw the fight free. The guarantee had to be met anyway. In the aftermath, four Shelby banks failed or left town, depositors lost savings in an era before federal deposit insurance, and Shelby became a national byword for boomtown overreach — a story later told in full in the book Shelby's Folly. The Promoter, publishing through it all, left the hometown record of the fight, the arena, the crowds and the hard years that followed. The Marias Museum of History and Art in Shelby still devotes major space to the fight, much of it drawn from the world the Promoter documented.
A century of Kavanagh ownership
The defining fact of the Promoter's history is the Kavanagh family, who acquired their interest in October 1922 — just before the Dempsey fight — and kept the paper for one hundred years. Generation followed generation. Brian and LeAnne Kavanagh were the fourth generation of Kavanaghs to own and operate the Promoter. Based in Cut Bank, they managed the Cut Bank Pioneer Press for John Kavanagh, worked at every position in the newspaper business, purchased the Glacier Reporter in 1985, then the Shelby Promoter and the Pioneer Press in 1995, and The Valierian in 2002.
That structure mattered for Shelby. Instead of being absorbed and closed, the Promoter kept its own name, its own Shelby identity and its own Toole County news report, while sharing the production strength of the Kavanaghs' Cut Bank operation. For small towns across the Hi-Line, that family hub model was the difference between having a newspaper and having none. When the sale finally came, LeAnne Kavanagh emphasised that the buyers, like the sellers, came from a family of newspapering and understood how vital a strong, vibrant newspaper presence is to a community.
The 2022 sale to the Mullen family
The Kavanagh sale was announced with an effective date of March 1, 2022, brokered by Cribb, Cope and Potts. The buyers were Jesse Mullen and Lloyd Mullen of Ponderosa Publications, LLC, affiliated with the Mullen Newspaper Company of Deer Lodge, which also manages the Silver State Post in Deer Lodge, the Philipsburg Mail and the Bitterroot Star in Stevensville. "After 40 years in this business, LeAnne and I have decided it is time to slow down," Brian Kavanagh said at the sale, adding that they felt they had made a difference in the communities they served.
Jesse Mullen responded that the family was honoured to be chosen as the new caretakers of the newspapers and looked forward to continuing award-winning Montana journalism. For Shelby readers, the practical meaning of the sale was continuity: the Promoter name, its weekly cycle and its Toole County coverage continued under new Montana ownership, rather than passing to an out-of-state chain or closing — the two fates that have ended many comparable papers.
Shelby and Toole County: the Promoter's home ground
Shelby today is a city of about 3,200 people at the crossroads of Interstate 15 and U.S. Route 2. It is one of the hub towns of Montana's Golden Triangle, the rich wheat-growing region between Cut Bank, Shelby and Great Falls, where barley, hay, pulse crops and canola are also raised and cattle ranching remains important. Toole County itself was established in 1914 and named for Joseph K. Toole, Montana's first governor. Oil and gas, discovered in the Kevin-Sunburst field area in the 1920s and near Shelby in the 1930s, are still produced in the county, giving the Promoter a second staple industry to cover alongside the grain elevators.
The town is also a transport crossroads: Amtrak's Empire Builder stops here, the BNSF railway maintains a significant presence, and I-15 runs north to the Sweetgrass border crossing into Canada. South of town, Lake Elwell, created by Tiber Dam on the Marias River about thirty miles away, draws anglers for walleye, pike and smallmouth bass. These are the ingredients of the Promoter's weekly mix — border and railroad traffic, farm prices and weather, energy news, fishing and hunting, and the business of the county courthouse.
What the Promoter covers
As Toole County's hometown paper, the Promoter covers Shelby city government and the Toole County commissioners, Shelby Public Schools and Coyotes athletics, North Toole County and Sunburst-area news, farm and oil reporting, obituaries, legal and public notices, church and club news, and the anniversaries, reunions and military service of local families. Its classifieds and advertising columns have long served the farm implement dealers, grain companies, cafes and Main Street shops of a small agricultural city.
The paper also carries the community's memory. The 1923 fight, the oil booms, the hard Depression years, wartime service, championship teams and the centennials of local institutions all live in its back files. Historical issues from 1918 to 1930 are freely readable through Chronicling America, making the Promoter a first stop for genealogists tracing Toole County families and for historians studying how a small Montana town experienced the oil era.
Shelby's other stories
The Promoter's century includes quieter national moments as well. In the early 2000s Shelby hosted Camp Collie, a rescue effort for mistreated dogs that drew national news coverage. Welker Farms, the large agricultural operation near Shelby that became famous through its social media channels, brought the area's modern farming to a global online audience. In 2020 the Well Done Foundation, which plugs orphaned and abandoned oil wells, opened a visitors' centre in Shelby — a story that neatly closed a circle the Promoter had been reporting since the first oil boom. Each of these stories reached the outside world, but each was covered first, and in most detail, at home.
The Promoter today
Today the Shelby Promoter continues as a weekly newspaper in print and online, published with its Hi-Line sister papers and owned by the Mullen Newspaper Company. Its contact address through the group has long been associated with the Cut Bank production hub, while its news identity remains firmly Shelby's. The paper's longevity — directories trace it to 1912, the Kavanaghs held it for exactly a century, and it has now passed intact to a new Montana newspaper family — is itself the headline.
In an era when more than half of Montana's counties are down to one or no original local news outlets, the Promoter's survival matters. Shelby still has a paper that prints its council minutes, its school scores, its wheat news and its obituaries under a name residents have read for over a hundred years. That continuity, from the oil-boom editors who covered Dempsey and Gibbons to the Mullen-era staff, is what a community newspaper is for.
