As with most State surveys in the 1890-1920 time frame, Montana issued its compilation of Montana Building Stone, as part of J.P.Rowes 1908 review of coal and other indigenous materials. Five strong factors have influenced the peculiar ways in which stone has been used or neglected in Missoula.

• Belt Supergroup rocks of Missoula and its environs do not have a well-developed degree of fissility, and are therefore not commonly foliated along original bedding planes. When foliated, the planes of fissility are usually found frequencies of spacing considerably greater than 15cm (to 1 m); a situation not generally conducive to producing highly usable quarried stone;
• Belt Supergroup rocks of Missoula are not found with sufficiently narrowly-spaced joints as to assist in breaking rock to manageably- small dimensions;
• When the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived, the best quality dimension stone available anywhere (vicinity of Helena) became readily available;
• There has been no single ethnic influx of peoples with whom the trade of stone masonry is traditional (such Italians or Greeks), and, finally;
• By the end of World War II, dimension stone generally had been supplanted on a worldwide scale, in the developed nations, by other materials, largely man-made, which were then and are today, cheaper to acquire and less costly to install.