Spurred by the arrival of streetcar service, the South Butte neighborhood developed from east to west between 1890 and 1900. French-Canadian immigrants Peter and Lizzie Huotte owned this Queen Anne style cottage—built circa 1895—from 1898 to 1904. Peter, a blacksmith at the Parrot Smelter, and Lizzie, a homemaker, took fine care of the property. In 1905, they hired Hall Bros. real estate firm to sell their home for $1,700. Their newspaper ad included a picture and noted the home’s “tip-top condition,” potential bathroom, storeroom, and two-room rear cabin (now demolished) that rented for $9 a month. Miner Charles Fournier and his wife Bertha bought the house and rented the cabin to lumberyard worker John F. Siegel. Unfortunately, a thief ransacked the cabin in July 1905 and stole $29 from Siegel’s mattress. William and Agnes One moved here with their three teenage children in 1917. When William died in 1920, their married daughter Bernice and her husband Thomas Williams, a railroad switchman, joined the crowded family home. Agnes lived next door after 1934, while Thomas and Bernice remained in residence until 1945.
]]>Hundreds of hipped-roof cottages like this one—built between 1884 and 1888—line Butte’s streets. The brick walls, front porch, and bay windows (since remodeled) distinguished this house from other simpler, clapboard cottages. In 1890, Pierce Butler, bookkeeper at W. A. Clark & Bros., lived here with travel agent Charles Mather. In 1904-5, widow Sarah E. Jenkins made her home here with her two grown daughters and Austrian cigar maker Isadore Pincus. By 1918, German national Gebert Wehman and his Austrian-born wife Dora lived here. That year, Dora was arrested for failing to register as an “enemy alien.” During World War I, fear of sabotage led the U.S. government to require “all citizens of Germany and its allies” to register with local authorities and carry a pass. Dora had become a U.S. citizen when she married her first husband, but after he died and she remarried Gebert, she lost her citizenship; since women’s citizenship followed their husbands’. These wartime anti-German regulations upset the lives of many peaceful residents and led many German-Americans to hide their heritage and culture.
]]>Railroad contractor Peter McVeigh built this Queen Anne Free Classic style house (and the one next door) as an investment in 1896. The dark stone foundation, red brick walls, dentilated (toothlike) window arches, and cutaway panels below and beside the windows were typical decorative conventions aimed at avoiding flat wall surfaces. Features like the paired porch columns and dentil moulding along the roofline reflected the growing popularity of classical details. Dr. James and Mrs. Sara Sligh rented the home in 1897. By September 1898, Patrick and Mary Halloran resided here with their children. Patrick was an auditor for the Butte, Anaconda, and Pacific Railway and Mary was a homemaker. Tragically, Mary died in 1903 following the birth of their twelfth child. After the Hallorans moved out in 1905, various skilled laborers rented the house until 1924 when Harry and Lillian Ware moved in. Harry was assistant superintendent at the Anaconda Company smelter and a beloved manager of the Anaconda Anodes baseball team. He died in 1926 at age forty-seven, but Lillian continued to live here, with their son and two daughters, until 1936.
]]>Great Falls architect William E. Donovan designed this distinctive California Mission style residence for Dr. Frances J. and Alice C. Adams in 1909. They named the home Angle Nook, referring to the unusual triangle-shaped lot it occupies. The clay tile roof, curvilinear gable ends, stucco walls, and wrought iron railings reflect Hispanic design elements. Donovan, who lived across the street, also designed the 1904 Nurses Home at Columbus Hospital, the Elk’s Club, and the Wadsworth house at No. 104. Dr. Adams had settled in Great Falls in 1890 after serving as an army surgeon at Fort Assinniboine (1883-1887) and in private practice in Fort Benton. He co-founded Columbus Hospital in 1893, established its nurses training school in 1894, and returned to the Army in 1898 as a volunteer surgeon during the Spanish-American War. In 1908, he became Great Falls’ first public health officer. Dr. Adams died in 1920, and the following year newlyweds Arthur and Harriet Strain purchased the house. Harriet raised their four children while Arthur served as secretary-treasurer of Strain’s department store. The Strains remained in residence until Arthur’s death in 1963.
]]>Newlyweds Thomas and Mary Baker purchased this gable-roof cottage in 1884. Thomas had arrived in Butte in 1877 and began working as a private engineer and surveyor. In 1878, he was appointed deputy U.S. mineral surveyor for Montana and Idaho. During his career he determined boundaries for many of Butte’s most valuable mineral lodes, platted the town of Anaconda, and became one of Butte’s most respected professionals. His wife Mary helped raise funds to build Butte’s first public library and was President of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, a group that fought to ban alcohol sales and promoted women’s suffrage. In the mid-1890s, the Bakers added rooms to the rear of the house and built a backyard cottage for renters. After Thomas died in 1906, Mary continued some of his work, becoming Montana’s first female land title attorney. She died in 1912 and their son, Jacob, a streetcar conductor, lived here with his wife Cora. Cora’s widowed sister, Mae Taylor, a nurse, lived with them after 1925. Cora died in 1937 and Jacob in 1944; Mae remained in residence until her death in 1954.
]]>“If a Mansion in Heaven for the Soul, Why Not a Palace on Earth for the Body” read a 1919 advertisement for the Billings Communal Mausoleum. Intrigued by the “opportunity … to sleep through eternity … secure against the ravages of time,” over two-hundred people subscribed to the project before construction began in 1920. The Montana Mausoleum Company promoted crypt burials as an opportunity for ordinary people to be treated in death like “kings … the favored rich and the honored heroes of all ages.” Promotional material promised “no decay” and “absolutely sanitary desiccation” in an “indestructible” monument of concrete, steel, bronze, and marble for the same price as a regular burial. Noted architect John G. Link, who was later entombed within, designed the 330-crypt mausoleum, incorporating the Montana Mausoleum Company’s patented ventilation system and reinforced concrete construction. The new, inexpensive construction material made building large, multiple-crypt facilities economically feasible. Link’s austere, classical design—which featured a symmetrical cruciform (cross-shaped) plan, barrel-vaulted roof, and columned portico—reflected the mausoleum’s promise of permanence. The stained-glass window memorializes the forty-nine Yellowstone County soldiers, and one Red Cross nurse, killed in World War I. Born of the Progressive Era’s commitment to sanitation and community improvement, communal mausoleums grew in popularity during the 1910s. Over the years, the mausoleum fell into disrepair; the mausoleum company had provided only a fraction of the $25,000 endowment promised for perpetual maintenance. In 1980, Landmark, Inc., a local preservation group took up the cause, raising thousands of dollars to restore the historic building.
]]>W. W. Alderson, one of Bozeman’s founders, held the first religious services in the area in 1865. The following year, Rev. A. M. Hough officially organized the Methodist Episcopal Church of Bozeman, while Alderson collected subscriptions to construct a frame building at the corner of Main and Tracy. Original church members included John Bozeman, John Mendenhall, D. E. Rouse, Nelson Story, W. H. Tracy, and Davis Willson. By 1869, First Methodist had not only an organ but also the only church bell in town. In 1874, they moved both the bell and belltower to this lot, where they built a Gothic style brick church. The bell had traveled to Fort Benton in 1869 by steamboat and then to Bozeman by oxcart. The belltower stood behind the church until 1905. That year, Swiss immigrant Joseph Uhlrich constructed the three-story square belltower, which still houses the original bell. The expanding church also built a flat-roof, two-story addition to the belltower’s north. Church parlors, a dining room, sewing room, kitchen and pantry occupied the basement. The Ladies’ Aid Society raised much of the money used to expand and maintain the building by hosting “one chicken pie supper after another.” A west side addition, with 350-seat auditorium, was completed in 1949. In 1994, the congregation replaced the original 1874 church with a new structure. While the building has undergone many changes, the 1905 belltower—covered with stucco in 1950—still calls the congregation to gather for worship, as Methodists have done in Bozeman since 1865.
]]>Thomas and Ellen P. Bryant commissioned this exuberant Queen Anne style house in 1897. Thomas was a foreman at the Original and Steward mines nearby and in 1898, became superintendent for all of copper magnate W. A. Clark’s Butte mines. The home’s gracious wraparound front porch, imposing tower clad with fish-scale shingles, and stained-glass windows were stylistic hallmarks as well as symbols of the Bryants’ wealth and status. Thomas was well respected for his many efforts to increase safety in the mines. He invented a bucket crosshead, which was installed in all of Butte’s mines to protect workers below from being hit by falling ore buckets. Widow Annie Agoa bought the home in 1904 and operated a boardinghouse. In 1911, St. Mary's Catholic Church acquired the property for use as a rectory. Two priests lived in the house, and a housekeeper lived in the basement apartment. She cooked their meals downstairs and then carried them up to the dining room. Beloved priest Father Sarsfield O'Sullivan—the last to serve at St. Mary's Church—lived here on and off until 1986.
]]>The first railroad to reach Montana was the Union Pacific (UP), which in 1881 established a terminal one mile south of Uptown. After the Northern Pacific (NP) reached Butte in 1890, it shared the UP’s wooden passenger depot. As Butte grew from town to metropolis, its businessmen lobbied for construction of a grand, union station. The Great Northern (which arrived in Butte in the late 1880s) refused, so in 1906, the NP replaced the 1881 depot with these three hipped-roof buildings. The center structure originally boasted a covered overhang shading the platform. It housed a three-hundred-person general waiting room; men’s smoking and ladies’ private rooms; and ticket and telegraph offices. A stairway led upstairs to a gallery, designed as a public “promenade and lounging place,” as well as to the railroad’s administrative offices. The western building housed the baggage and freight offices; the eastern building housed the express offices and a restaurant. By 1916, twelve NP and four UP passenger trains stopped daily, in addition to “specials,” like the UP’s summer Sunday fishing train. The last passenger train left the station in 1979.
]]>Calls for a better Gallatin County jail came in 1886, only five years after the county’s second jail was established in the original courthouse’s basement. A grand jury found that the facility lacked proper ventilation, sewer, and security, as well as sorely needed cells for separating men, women, children, and violent inmates. Unfortunately for prisoners, the county failed to remedy the situation until 1908 when residents passed a $35,000 bond issue. Proponents of the new jail argued that “fresh air and sunlight are total strangers in the present hole in the ground and the atmosphere reeks with stench that would fatten any number of vicious bacteria . . . .” County commissioners hired architect Fred Willson to design the building. Willson, who later became Bozeman’s architect of note, designed dozens of businesses, homes, and civic buildings, including the present 1935–36 courthouse. The jail, completed in 1911, projected strength and security through its crenelated parapet and portico, solid paver-brick walls, and barred windows with heavy stone sills and lintels. The first floor included eight jail cells, six isolation cells, sheriff’s and jailer’s offices, a dining room, kitchen, bathroom, gallows room, twenty-four bed “Bullpen,” and a vault. Cells for women and children, a bathroom, and the jailer’s quarters filled the second floor. Safety features included a padded cell and double-locking cell block doors. Although six cellmates escaped through a basement utility tunnel just twenty days after the jail opened, this distinctive downtown building continued to house Gallatin County prisoners until 1982.
]]>For centuries, the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons have offered their members support, connections, and community. These benefits spurred Montana settlers to charter Masonic lodges and Orders of the Eastern Star. Ionic Lodge No. 38 (1889), and Leona Lodge No. 31 (1903), launched efforts to build a permanent home in Hamilton in February 1909. Members hired Missoula architects John and Josephine Kennedy to draw plans for a typical brick temple with two, first-floor commercial stores and lodge rooms upstairs. Most temples valued the secrecy a windowless, second-floor main lodge room offered. After fundraising stalled, the project languished until 1915 when members hired local architect Bernhard G. Peterson to redesign the building. Peterson’s imposing Neoclassical Revival style design featured grand Ionic columns, tall arched windows, and a pedimented portico. Instead of first-floor commercial space, he specified an unusual full-height, first-floor lodge room with a balcony along the east wall, tamarack wood paneling, and small arched windows. A large crowd of western Montana members officially dedicated the building on September 7, 1916. As of 2021, both lodges continued to use the building for its intended purpose.
]]>Before Alfred and Belle Kremer were married in late 1909, they planned to build this exemplary Craftsman style residence, completed in 1910. Alfred, a lawyer, and Belle, a homemaker and club woman, chose house plans created by New York furniture designer Gustav Stickley. Stickley was a popular promoter of the Arts and Crafts design movement, which encouraged simplicity, natural materials, and comfort in decorative arts and architecture. While numerous Craftsman bungalows line Butte’s streets, the Kremer home is exceptional in its detailing. From the expansive wood-shingle siding and sleeping porch to the spacious open floorplan, imposing stone fireplace, and built-in cabinetry, the house radiates the Craftsman ideal. The Kremer’s artistic home reflected their ardent support for the arts. In the 1920s, they organized the Butte Community Concert Association to bring international music and dance to town. Both were also active with Butte Friends of the Library and the Junior League. Belle died in 1942, but Alfred lived here until his death in 1975. Their only daughter, Isabel—a retired United Nations employee and executive with Girl Scouts of America—resided here from 1975 to 1978.
]]>For over one hundred years, the Paradise School served as the educational and social center of this working-class railroad, timber, and agricultural community. After the Northern Pacific Railway (NP) completed its transcontinental line through Montana Territory in 1883, it established towns and support facilities across its routes. By 1908, the NP had built the “Low Line,” running along the Clark Fork River from St. Regis to Paradise, where a new tie-treating plant—one of two such plants along the route—was in full operation. The NP Hotel and “beanery” cafe, three general stores, two drug stores, Catholic and Protestant churches, a post office, meat market, pool hall, icehouse, and bakery comprised the business district. The town, which had three-hundred people in 1910, outgrew its original one-room school. The NP donated land just south of town, and Missoula husband-and-wife architects, John and Josephine Kennedy, designed this elegant, four-room, brick school with Italian Renaissance and Craftsman style details. From its opening in 1910 through to the 1960s, teachers and community members rallied to improve the school, enhancing heating, plumbing, and building finishes, and adding a playground, bus transportation, an athletics program, and music enrichment. Although the school initially served all grades, high school students began commuting via train to Thompson Falls in 1926. Always tied to the railroad and timber industry’s health, Paradise School’s enrollment fell throughout the 1970s, especially after 1982 when the tie plant ceased operations. Though the school closed in 2013, dedicated residents transformed the school into a community, arts, and visitors’ center in 2016.
]]>Austrian-born brewer John V. Petritz moved his saloon and brewery from Walkerville to still-developing Anaconda in 1883. Three years later, he branched into the wholesale liquor business, becoming Anaconda’s sole Pabst Brewing Company distributor. By 1892, he hired contractors to build a one-story brick building on this site. Tietgen’s Cigars, Houck Real Estate, and the Rocky Mountain Telegraph Company were the first tenants. Despite a huge economic downturn known as the Panic of 1893, Petritz engaged architect Herman Kemna to enlarge the building, adding a basement, second story, and detached two-story brick bottling plant. The new façade featured bands of small glass tiles above the storefront windows and elaborate brickwork on the parapet. Petritz’s liquor business and saloon supplanted the original stores, while Justice of the Peace H. H. Mayhew and Mrs. Wormell’s Progressive Art School occupied rooms upstairs. Petritz sold the buildings to Missouri investors for $25,000 in 1899 and moved with his family to Rockford, Illinois. The upstairs rooms were used for lodging, while various drug stores, saloons, clothing stores, and movie theaters occupied the first floor through to the 1930s.
]]>The Reverend George M. and Mary Fisher built this exemplary Victorian Stick style residence in 1892. It remains one of Kalispell’s few wood-frame houses constructed before 1895. Popular in the late nineteenth century, the Stick style featured varied siding materials, wood trim installed to look like Medieval timber beams, and boxed bay windows. The two-story, V-shaped bay window is a distinctive regional adaption. The house is one of several tangible reflections of the Fishers’ influence. Rev. Fisher arrived from Ohio to western Montana in 1882. He traveled the region, establishing Presbyterian missions in the Bitterroot and Flathead valleys, and, in 1886, married Mary Swaney, an accomplished pianist. The couple purchased government land in what is now Kalispell’s East Side neighborhood in 1887, later selling it for a handsome profit to Charles Conrad’s Kalispell Townsite Company. They used the proceeds to build their home and to finance construction of Kalispell’s original Presbyterian Church. The Fishers raised six children, employed a Chinese cook (despite laws forbidding it), and often gave food and shelter to the Pend d’Oreille and Kootenai people. Rev. Fisher helped build six Presbyterian churches in the Flathead and was also instrumental in establishing Kalispell’s public school system. Before he died in 1934, he wrote in his memoirs, “Through all these fifty years of Sky Piloting, I have worked unceasingly to make life better and happier for men and women of all creeds, races, and nationalities—the melting pot of humanity we call America.”
]]>Widower Knute Robbin sold his hardware enterprises in Minnesota and South Dakota to move to Kalispell with his ten children in 1915. Sons Hector, Rudolph, and Arthur soon established Robbin Brothers Hardware in the McIntosh Building on Main Street. Nearby, sons George and Raymond partnered as Robbin Brothers Clothing, known for fine men’s apparel tailored on site. Rudolph Robbin had this Craftsman style house built in 1922, where he lived at different times with brothers Arthur, George, Walter, and Raymond and sisters Selma and Hulda. Sister Elinor, a teacher and artist, also resided here at times. In the 1930s, Selma, the third oldest sibling and a Montana trapshooting champion, purchased the home with her husband, Dr. Albert Dodge. Dodge’s medical practice ended with his death in 1959 at the age of ninety-one. The residence included a unique Rustic style den lined with unpeeled cedar logs. The Dodges decorated it with taxidermy, Native American regalia and artifacts, and western photographs by L. A. Huffman and Kalispell’s Tomar Hileman. Oak trees in the yard stand as testimony to Dr. Dodge, who planted them as acorns.
]]>George W. and Eliza Shaw hired architects Carl. M. Neuhausen and Frank M. Williams to design this stone carriage house in 1890. In addition to housing the family’s carriage, it held horses, chickens, and feed. In 1893, the Shaws, in partnership with Eliza’s father, Hugh Menown, remodeled it into a food processing factory. It was Montana’s first successful food manufacturing plant and the only home industry in the neighborhood. Their products—sold statewide—included Montana Peerless Baking Powder, Shaw's Best Pancake Flour, and Shaw's Best Wheat Cream-lets (hot cereal). The company used only flour milled from Montana-grown wheat—an effort to promote home industries and bring Montana out of the economic depression that followed the 1893 Silver Panic. Three generations of the family operated what had started as H. Menown and Company, which after Hugh’s death in 1895, became Shaw’s Best. George served as sales and business manager while Eliza and the children ran the factory. The Shaws’ youngest child Lida purchased the business in 1911. Sadly, she died of tuberculosis in 1912, and George died in 1913. Eliza and their son George continued the business until 1918, when they converted the building into a garage/storage space. Thereafter, neither the Shaws nor the Sidor family, who bought the property in 1954, ever made alterations to the second floor. In 2021, wood barrels of flour and tartaric acid, mixing machinery, never-used Shaw’s Best packaging, and a hybrid motor-driven belt and pulley system remained intact in this rare residential factory.
]]>Prominent Butte architect H. M. Patterson designed four identical duplexes along this block in 1899 for William A. Clark Jr., the son of copper king W. A. Clark. These distinctive Queen Anne style residences feature exaggerated street-facing gables and multi-textured wall surfaces of granite, brick, clapboard, and wood shingles. Each duplex cost a substantial $4,000. Young Clark’s residential development signaled the move of Butte’s affluent, socially prominent citizens to the far west side with Excelsior as the main artery. Clark’s law school friend and future chief legal adviser, John Templeman, lived at No. 226 with his wife Irene (Belle) and son Percy until 1920. John was a former University of Virginia football star and became one of Butte’s most respected lawyers. Early tenants at No. 224 included George Cochrane, agent for the Revere Rubber Company, and music store owner William Dierks and family. Eye doctor Thomas A. Grigg and his wife Joanna purchased the duplex in 1920. Joanna was an accomplished painter and, as president of the Butte Woman’s Club, devoted her time to philanthropic efforts. Thomas died in 1934 and Joanna in 1935.
]]>Hotel proprietors Clara Lano and Anna Thompson hired contractor Albert Broadland to build this fifty-room apartment building in 1917. They named it the Dyckman after the luxurious Dyckman Hotel in Minneapolis, near where Clara grew up. Clara and Anna chose the design for the tasteful yet modest Classical style building, which featured large windows and hot and cold water in every room. Anna and Clara managed the building, but only Anna lived here. Clara, who married dentist Samuel Herman in 1918, was a founder and president of the Butte Business and Professional Women’s Club. Many of the Dyckman tenants were also professional women. In 1920, assistant superintendents of Butte schools Belle Schofied and Elga Shearer rented rooms, and talented mother/daughter pianists Marie and Charlotte Leipheimer gave piano lessons in Charlotte’s room. An array of nurses, stenographers, saleswomen, and a few men filled the building. Dr. Harvey Casebeer purchased the Dyckman for his Ear, Nose, and Throat Hospital in 1952. He remodeled the first two floors for medical offices and added a new hospital wing for surgery patients. The third floor remained an apartment house for women.
]]>