New owners to carry on Fishtail General Store's storied legacy

FISHTAIL — Katy Martin has a simple directive for the couple taking over the Fishtail General Store after a quarter century under her stewardship.

“Don’t get rid of the phone booth, as it is one of the last land line connections for emergencies.” Katy said.

Bryan and Celena Rose have no intention of moving the telephone booth. Or much else, for that matter.

The couple, set to take official ownership June 1, say preserving the character of the beloved landmark — right down to the framework of photographs on the walls and the indoor picnic table where ranchers gather for coffee — is as central to their vision as keeping the lights on.

“She wouldn’t be selling it to us if she didn’t know it was special to us , important to us,” Bryan said. “The history on this table alone ...”

He let the sentence trail off the way people do when words feel insufficient.

A store, a story and seven years of patience

The Fishtail General Store is something of an institution, 125 years old, in a community of roughly 60 residents tucked beneath the Beartooth Mountains on the edge of Stillwater County. For the past 25 years, Katy has been its heart — stocking more than 20,000 individual items, running a beloved deli, feeding workers at the nearby Sibanye-Stillwater mine and doing the kind of neighborly commerce that’s increasingly rare in rural America.

The store carries soup, nuts, candy, produce, drinks and a deli that includes take-and-bake pizzas. There’s a souvenir section stocked exclusively with Montana-made merchandise — postcards, stickers, T-shirts and novelties including freeze-dried huckleberry ice cream.

There’s even free coffee, which a couple of regulars have been known to show up for nearly every morning. The store stocks whatever the community and tourists alike need, hardware, tools, camping and fishing equipment.

“It’s kind of like the Chamber of Commerce,” Martin has said of the store.

She and her late husband, Bill, purchased it 25 years ago. The previous owners at the time were considering changing the store to storage units, but Katy and Bill knew the importance of the store to the community and couldn’t bear the idea of its long history being erased.

Katy and Bill discussed the purchase as they, too, had zero retail experience. They bought it anyway because they didn’t want to see it disappear the way small-town institutions so often do.

Katy has since grown her footprint considerably. Her wholesale venture, Fishtail Foods Distributing, supplies other small businesses throughout Stillwater County and beyond — including pizza crust for Nye Trading Post’s Nye Pie Pizza and granola for a business in Livingston.

That operation has grown to serve around 500 employees and is now based in Butte. She said it needs her full attention.

“It’s time,” she said.

Finding the right successor wasn’t something Katy took lightly. She had known Bryan Rose for years — the two first connected when he worked for Mercedes in Billings, where she also happened to be a customer.

“Bryan said, ‘If you ever think about selling it, let me know’,” Katy recalled. That conversation sat dormant for seven years. Then, about a year and a half ago, Katy called Bryan.

“Are you still interested in the store?”

He drove over from the Bitterroot Valley the same day, proving he was the person Katy was looking for — someone who genuinely loved the place.

From Louisville to the Beartooths, by way of a calling

Bryan Rose grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and spent 33 years in the automotive industry, traveling extensively (and globally for the last couple of years), before deciding it was time to settle somewhere and put down new roots.

He first came to Montana in 2014, visiting a friend who had served in the military. He came back in 2015. That was enough.

“I told my family at the time that we were moving,” he said. “We picked up and moved without consideration of income.”

He landed in Billings, and for three or four months worked in the deli at the General Store, in mid-2023, before circumstances took him to the Bitterroot. Through it all, the mountains never let him go.

“Every time you go down any highway you’re humbled by what you see,” he said. “Nothing that will humble you like a mountain. It got in me at 14 years old.”

Celena grew up in the Bitterroot Valley — in the ranching culture, the waving-at-strangers culture, a slower pace that she and Bryan both say is harder to find even in Montana these days.

“Too many people in the Bitterroot,” she said. “They don’t wave.”

Now they’re heading into the biggest personal and professional adventure of their lives together.

“Make it or break it,” Bryan said with a laugh — though he doesn’t seem to think it’ll be the latter.

Learning the ropes

Neither Bryan nor Celena has a retail background — Bryan comes from automotive, Celena from process and inventory management — but they’ve been doing their homework, watching archival videos of Katy running the store, spending time in the building and introducing themselves to regulars. Katy herself started from scratch, and she’s the first to say so.

The deli is a priority. So is maintaining the services to help provide for the miners, a relationship they plan to honor and grow.

Consumable miner gear, such as reflective clothing and boots are a mainstay. They’re also eyeing an expansion into online and social media markets — territory Katy largely left untapped. And the one-pump gas station, which Martin has kept competitively priced — often lower than Billings — will continue serving the community.

They’re clear-eyed about the challenges. Summers will be strong. Winters will be lean. Produce will go bad sometimes.

“When you own a business like this, it’s important to understand there are going to be ups and downs,” Katy said. “Summers are great. It’s a little sparser in the winter. But it gives you time to make some changes, fix some things up.”

Bryan spent decades in a cyclical industry. He’s not afraid of slow seasons.

“No guarantees in life,” he said. “But if you prepare for it properly, you should be able to manage the ebbs and flows.”

Small store, big community

What the Roses keep coming back to — more than inventory systems, more than profit margins, more than social media strategy — is the community itself.

“I don’t want to just run the store,” Bryan said. “I want to be part of the community.”

The General Store — with its diner-ish feel, picnic table full of ranchers and fire glowing in the potbelly stove — has always been more than a retail outlet. It’s a gathering place. A touchstone. The kind of place where the same faces show up every day for lunch, where neighbors catch up, where people going through hard times know there’s somewhere familiar to land.

Fishtail, Katy notes, is protected from the sprawl swallowing other Montana communities. Much of the surrounding land is under conservation easement — ranches that won’t be subdivided, roads that won’t be widened, a skyline that won’t be cluttered with new construction.

“You don’t see it becoming a metropolitan area,” she said. “It’s lovely.”

That’s precisely what drew Bryan and Celena here — and what keeps them up at night trying to figure out housing, since there are precious few homes for sale in a town of 60.

“Nothing I would love more than to be able to walk to work,” Bryan said.

They’ll get there.

Katy, for her part, isn’t disappearing. She’ll be a few doors down — close enough to help, close enough to check on the telephone booth.

“If they hurry and I still have my memory,” she said, grinning, “I’ll help them out.”