Amber and Cassie Coburn Are Redefining What's Possible for Small Town Restaurants and Young Entrepreneurs
- Montana Edit
- 14 hours ago
- 6 min read
White Sulphur Springs, MT is not the kind of town where people expect to find craft cocktails, a speakeasy, a curated thrift store, a wine society, and a hospitality group with locations across Montana. And yet, that’s exactly what Cassie Coburn and Amber (Coburn) Updegrave have built here — two sisters who grew up in their mom’s restaurant, worked for tips through high school and college, and eventually built restaurants of their own. Amber and Cassie’s story is one that makes you rethink everything you assume about small towns, young entrepreneurs, and what’s possible when you simply refuse to hear no.
Where It All Started
If you want to understand where Amber and Cassie get their entrepreneurial drive, start with their mom. Kimberly Durham has four degrees — business, hospitality, communications, and law. She raised four kids as a single mom, put herself through law school along the way, became the county attorney in Meagher County, and settled the family in White Sulphur Springs in 2010.
Going out to eat was one of the family’s favorite things to do together. When they arrived in White Sulphur and found the dining options limited, their mom bought one of the restaurants that was for sale and turned it into a place worth going to. Bar 47 — named for Meagher County’s county number — was born.
"Everybody said she was crazy," Cassie recalls. "Including us."
Amber and Cassie, twins, started working at Bar 47 in high school — waiting tables, running food, learning the rhythms of a restaurant from the inside. They couldn’t serve alcohol yet, so other employees would run drinks while they took orders. The work ethic, the customer service instincts, the ability to handle conflict and communicate with anyone — they trace all of it back to those years waiting tables.
It was the first chapter of what would eventually become a family business spanning the state.
The Jawbone Idea
When they graduated high school, both sisters received the Charles M. Bair Memorial Scholarship — a full-ride given annually to students from Meagher and Wheatland counties, funded by a trust left by the Bair family. With tuition covered, their dad’s college savings fund was freed up for something else entirely.
The owner of The Mint in White Sulphur Springs passed away. In Montana, liquor licenses are tied to population, and if they go out of use, they can disappear. Their mom called them at the University of Portland, where they’d just finished their first semester. You only have to be 19 to own a liquor license in Montana, she told them. If you want to make an investment, now’s the time.
They did their research in Australia — studying abroad in Western Australia the summer of 2017, visiting speakeasies and rum bars, thinking about what White Sulphur was missing. Every restaurant in town served a burger. Nobody was doing craft cocktails. Nobody had a space that felt intimate, elevated, or like a reason to stay in town instead of driving to Bozeman or Helena for a night out.
They came back with an idea, transferred to Carroll College in Helena to be closer to home, and filed for a protest hearing to defend their right to purchase the liquor license. Three people protested. Amber and Cassie were 19 and could only bring character witnesses. They won. The Jawbone — named for the historic railroad that ran through White Sulphur and was famously “jawboned” into existence without the money to fund it — opened in the summer of 2018 during Red Ants Pants weekend.
The First Year
The first year was hard. Temperatures dropped below zero for over thirty days that winter and stayed there. There were nights with no customers. Cassie would finish her last class at Carroll at 2pm on Thursdays, run to Costco for restaurant supplies, drive to White Sulphur, open the Jawbone by 5pm, close at 9, and drive back to Helena. Amber held down Fridays. They both came home for the weekend. They did this for a year and a half.
When one of them was running the restaurant solo, she was the server, the bartender, and the dishwasher. They still weren’t taking a paycheck.
Their first chef quit in 2019. “We were like, this is the end of the Jawbone,” Cassie says. They hired again quickly. That person damaged the apartment they owned above the restaurant. They took their spring break of 2020 to visit family and regroup. Then COVID hit and they had to close.
Closing gave them something unexpected: time. They finished their senior year in Helena, found a new chef without rushing, and reopened in June 2020. They came back steadier than they left.
"Looking around the Jawbone today — reservations filling up, cocktails flowing, the intimate atmosphere they envisioned finally thriving — it's hard to believe there were nights when no one showed up. But Amber and Cassie learned early: you have to keep showing up, even when it's hard. Especially when it's hard."
The Jawbone Group
The Jawbone was just the beginning. As the business grew, so did the family’s ambitions. Their mom’s husband Tom Durham came into the picture when he and their mom married in 2020 — he owned a bar called the Lake Bar in Polson, which joined the fold and was eventually renamed the Durham. The Old Post in Missoula, an iconic spot their mom had frequented during law school, came next. Beneath it, the Grotto — a below-grade speakeasy with a cocktail mixologist and pop-up events — found its home. They also acquired the Parberry Building next door to Bar 47, a historic property named for Dr. William Parberry, one of White Sulphur’s founders. It had sat empty for years. They exposed the original brick, refinished the floors, and opened a thrift store and coffee shop. The upstairs is still being planned — a mix of short-term rentals, studio apartments, and possibly hostel-style rooms.
Today, Amber, Cassie, and their mom operate it all under the Jawbone Group, LLC. The White Sulphur Springs Wine Society, a wine club and dinner pairing series, runs as a sub-brand. Cassie also serves as the executive director of the Meagher County Stewardship Council, a nonprofit preparing the community for the arrival of a copper mine — negotiating community benefits agreements, managing water monitoring, and building a permanent fund to sustain the county long after the mine closes.
In It Together
Doing all of this together as sisters has required figuring out how to work together as business partners. They went to family therapy along the way — a decision they both stand behind. “The things you say to a family member, you would never say to a coworker,” Cassie says. They figured out their respective strengths: Amber handles creative, marketing, and design; Cassie focuses on employees and operations. It works.
They’ve also worked to make the Jawbone Group a place where people can build careers. Health insurance, 401k, gym memberships, PTO, leadership development — benefits that aren’t common in the service industry. “People told us after we graduated college, oh, so you came home to wait tables,” Cassie says. “And we were like, well, we own this business. But also — who cares if we are?”
What's Next
Meagher County is currently the subject of a University of Montana study on women business ownership. The county has an unusually high concentration of women-led businesses — unusual enough that researchers are using it as a case study, with a documentary in the works. Amber and Cassie are among those featured.
White Sulphur is growing. The hot springs, the Showdown ski area, the proximity to wilderness — more people are discovering it as a weekend destination. The Jawbone has grown alongside it. “We really feel like this is our calling,” Cassie says. “Getting the Bair Scholarship, all the opportunities we’ve had from this community — being able to open a business in a building that sat empty for years, paying taxes, supporting our nonprofits, showing young people what leadership looks like here. We’re able to do that through the business in a way we couldn’t do personally. That means something.”
They are thoughtful about what growth looks like from here. The mission has always been about bringing good food to small communities, but the group is weighing what expansion looks like across the state. Good food, good community — in White Sulphur Springs and wherever they go from here.
Visit the Jawbone Group
The Jawbone — White Sulphur Springs | @thejawbonemt
The Parberry — White Sulphur Springs | @the_parberry
The Old Post — Missoula | @the_oldpostmt
The Grotto — Missoula | @thegrottomissoula
The Durham — Polson | @the_durhambar
