Buying Land in Toole County, Montana

No county-wide zoning, and a lean administrative structure

Toole County has no county-wide zoning -- confirmed directly, not merely assumed from the state-level pattern. What exists instead is a set of Subdivision Regulations, most recently amended and adopted by the County Commission on December 18, 2023, authorized under the state Subdivision and Platting Act, aimed at ensuring adequate light, air, water supply, and other public infrastructure requirements for new land divisions. Unlike many Montana counties, Toole does not appear to maintain a separate planning department or planner position -- subdivision review and the regulations themselves are administered directly through the County Commission's office and the Clerk and Recorder, both housed at the Toole County Courthouse in Shelby. If you're evaluating a parcel inside Shelby's city limits specifically, note that the City of Shelby maintains its own municipal zoning and subdivision code (Titles 12 and 13 of its municipal code) separate from the county's rural framework -- a materially different regulatory environment than land outside town.

Sweetgrass: a real, working international border crossing -- and a different place from Sweet Grass County

One geographic point is worth stating plainly because the names are genuinely easy to confuse: the unincorporated community of Sweetgrass, inside Toole County on I-15 at the Canadian border, is a different place entirely from Sweet Grass County, a separate Montana county roughly 200 miles to the south with its seat at Big Timber (covered on its own page on this site). Sweetgrass, Toole County, hosts the Sweetgrass-Coutts Border Crossing, connecting I-15 on the American side with Alberta Highway 4 on the Canadian side. It is documented as the busiest port of entry on the Montana-Alberta border and the only 24-hour commercial crossing between Montana and Alberta, with a U.S. Customs and Border Protection office operating continuously at the crossing.

For a land buyer, an active 24-hour international freight and passenger crossing is a genuine, durable economic anchor for the northern part of the county -- it supports trucking, logistics, and cross-border commerce infrastructure in a way most rural Montana counties don't have. It's a reasonable factor to weigh for commercial or industrial land near the corridor, though it doesn't change the underlying no-zoning regulatory picture described above.

A dual-track economy: wheat and cattle alongside a century of oil history

Toole County's contemporary economy runs on two real tracks. Agriculture -- primarily wheat farming and cattle ranching -- remains the base of the local economy in a small, sparsely populated county (roughly 1,916 square miles with fewer than 3 people per square mile). Layered on top of that is a genuinely historic oil industry: the March 1922 discovery well four miles north of the town of Kevin launched Montana's entire commercial oil industry, and the resulting Kevin-Sunburst Field -- situated along the Sweetgrass Arch, a regional geologic structure recognized by the USGS as early as the 1920s for its oil and gas potential -- has cumulatively produced tens of millions of barrels of oil since. Toole County continues to see meaningful acreage offered at Montana state mineral-lease sales tied to this same geology.

For a land buyer, the practical implication is that mineral ownership here is a live question, not a formality. Long-producing oil regions like this one commonly have mineral estates severed from the surface estate across multiple past transactions, meaning the person selling you the surface may not own -- and may never have owned -- the oil, gas, and other minerals beneath it. A full title search and mineral-rights review, ideally including a check for any active leases or well permits affecting the specific parcel, is worth the cost here in a way it might not be in a Montana county with no oil history at all.