MFT first emerged in 1917 when a small group of professors at Montana State College (now the University of Montana) petitioned the newly created AFT (Chicago 1916) for affiliate status and became AFT Local 111. Unfortunately that unit soon disappeared not to remerge until 1972 again at the University of Montana. In the interim, AFT helped organize local AFT affiliates in union stronghold cities Butte and Anaconda and elsewhere mostly in western and southwestern Montana. In 1936, almost forty years before the state legislature provided public employees the right to organize for collective bargaining purposes, the Butte Teachers Union negotiated the first public employee labor agreement in America with the Butte School district. In 1972 a scattering of AFT affiliated local bargaining units organized MFT as an AFT state affiliate and chose Butte teacher Jim McGarvey as their first and as it turned out only executive director. McGarvey continued to serve as executive director until MFT merged with MEA in 2000.