Anaconda grew practically overnight. Platted in June 1883, Anaconda already boasted eighty buildings by December 1884, including a wood-frame clothing store on this corner, built by pioneering Jewish merchant Wolfe (William) Copinus. In 1888, Copinus hired architect D. F. McDevitt to design this two-story, brick business block. The building’s recessed entrance, second-story rough-cut stone lintels, decorative molded window hoods, and corbeled (stepped) brick cornice reflect the era’s design aesthetic, which called for creating interest through texture and angles. Named the Ida Block after Copinus’s daughter, it originally housed a corner drugstore and an office and clothing store on Commercial Avenue. By 1896, a saloon had replaced the drug store, and for most of the twentieth century, the Ida housed a saloon or other business for male entertainment. In a brief exception, it was home to the Collier Preparatory and Commercial School, which offered classes—including drafting and blueprint reading—from 1912 to 1916. Women’s suffrage advocates met upstairs in 1913. Despite their efforts, Deer Lodge County rejected women’s suffrage by 59 to 41 percent, even as the amendment passed statewide.
]]>In the 1920s, Great Falls builder George Calvert filled this block with single-family houses, some on speculation, and others for specific clients. He constructed this house for Great Northern Railway conductor John Cox, his wife Louisa, and their one-year-old son, John, in 1919. A single story with a full basement, the residence features distinctive decorative shingles as well as the more typical lap-wood siding. Wide overhanging eaves, decorative wooden brackets, and battered porch supports are among the home’s Craftsman style features. Before 1934, when the federal government created the Federal Housing Administration—a New Deal agency dedicated to stimulating the economy by aiding potential homebuyers—large down payments and short-term mortgages were the norm. To build this home, John Cox took a small mortgage from the Goodrich Call Lumber Company, a loan he repaid by 1922. That same year, daughter Ruth was born. The Coxes clearly loved the residence, which became their lifelong home. Sometime before 1950, the family enclosed the front porch and built a rear addition. John died in 1958, but Louisa remained here until shortly before her death in 1980.
]]>A women’s club founded the Missoula library, which grew out of an 1882 ladies’ reading group. By 1894, the city library had 500 volumes and had secured public tax support. Six years later, Missoula residents had access to almost 5,000 books from the library’s rented downtown rooms. In 1903, both the chair of the women’s club library committee and Missoula’s mayor contacted steel magnate and library benefactor Andrew Carnegie, requesting funds for a dedicated building. Carnegie, who funded over 1,600 libraries nationwide and 17 in Montana, pledged $12,500 toward the new building. For this “temple of learning,” Missoula architect A. J. Gibson offered a neo-classical design, coincidentally incorporating many stylistic elements later associated with Carnegie Classic design. After Missoula’s population quadrupled between 1900 and 1910, the library requested additional funding from the Carnegie Foundation. It received a second grant of $9,000 in 1911. Architect Ole Bakke designed the second-story addition, adding Craftsman style elements without obscuring the essence of Gibson’s original design. In 1974, the library moved to larger quarters, but the building continues to serve the public as the Missoula Art Museum.
]]>A Jewish immigrant from Poland, tailor Henry Frank first arrived in Montana in 1867. He and his wife Barbara followed the Northern Pacific Railroad to Livingston, where they built the city’s first brick business block in 1883 on East Park. In 1890, Frank purchased a one-story wood-frame building on Main Street, which housed a grocer and a barber. The next year he cleared the lot to build this ornately decorated commercial block, “one of the most handsome and substantial structures in the city.” The façade features decorative brickwork, stone ornamentation, and an elaborate cast-iron cornice manufactured by Mesker Bros. Iron Works in St. Louis. Metal cornices, designed to look like carved stone for a fraction of the cost, were sold through the mail and shipped by rail in eight-foot sections. Advertising himself as the “merchant tailor,” Henry Frank offered men and boy’s clothing—from fine suits to the “heavy substantial clothing required by hunters, miners, [and] cowboys.” Although the building has housed Bob’s Outdoor (formerly Bob’s Army Store) since 1958, ghost signs still advertise Frank’s Clothier and the Levi Strauss overalls it sold.
]]>Anaconda’s business leaders located on the town’s west side beginning in the 1890s. The idyllic neighborhood was far from the smelter and close to commerce on Main and Park streets. Tree-lined sidewalks with street lamps, a large public park, and a new library attracted Anaconda’s upper- and middle-class families. The Kretzer family home, built in 1913, incorporates typical Craftsman elements in its side gable roof with prominent knee braces, an integrated full-width porch, and a gabled dormer. Triple, battered (tapered) porch columns with stepped capitals, arched moldings, and leaded glass windows further distinguish the home’s high-style Craftsman character. German butcher Otto Kretzer and wife Esther owned the Washoe Market, raised five children, and were energetic community boosters. Otto was a charter member of the local Kiwanis Club, and a singer in the Kiwanis Quartet. Esther was active with the Methodist Episcopal Church and Ladies Home Missionary Society. They lost their oldest son to appendicitis in 1920, another son to illness in 1941, and their youngest son, Jack, died a war hero in Japan in 1945. The Kretzers left Third Street after 1940.
]]>Martin J. Plumb, wife Nancy, and their two grown children moved into their new bungalow in the fall of 1916. Builders Glenn Knodle and Frank McCabe built the house using catalog home plans and lumber from Kenyon-Noble Lumber Company. The house was so handsome it was featured in a 1917 Kenyon-Noble advertisement in the local paper. By this time residential trends favored the modest Craftsman style over the more exuberant Queen Anne style. The Plumb’s house featured key Craftsman stylistic elements in its large knee braces in the eaves, decorative window sashes, and interior built-in bookcases with tapered columns. Fittingly, Martin Plumb played a role in Bozeman’s early plumbing industry. He managed the Bozeman Water Works from 1902 until 1909 and later started a plumbing business with Charles Lundwall. By 1920, Plumb had opened a plumbing supply shop in Manhattan and remained in the plumbing business until his retirement in 1935. Widow Anna Winning purchased the home in 1940 and rented rooms to college students. Beloved Montana State University football coach Jim Sweeney and family lived here from 1962 to 1963.
]]>St. Joseph’s Hospital Nurses’ Training School originally opened in 1919, but this building, completed in 1936, put the hospital on a level playing field with eight other Montana Catholic hospital training schools. Until the mid-twentieth century, hospitals almost exclusively provided nurses’ education. In exchange for room and board, students received on-the-job training. Most hospitals employed only a few graduate nurses in supervisory positions, while student nurses provided most of the bedside care. Prominent Montana architect J. G. Link designed the dormitory in the Renaissance Revival style; mason J. C. Boespflug supervised construction. Its design departed from the imposing stone hospital. Decorative cast stone quoins at the corners and a checkerboard frieze at the roofline offered a playful counterpoint to the more stoic main building. Inside it provided “sunny, airy” bedrooms for twenty nurses, along with a lounge, classroom, and recreation room. The sisters hoped its construction would elevate St. Joseph’s, which could now offer “every advantage to patients and student nurses which may be had elsewhere.” After 1977, the building sat empty for thirty years but was rescued and redeveloped into apartments in 2008.
]]>Wealthy banker Nesbit Rochester bought this bay-fronted brick building as an investment property during the summer of 1906. The building was listed among other “large homes” for sale that summer for $4,500. Nesbit and family lived just a few doors down at 845 West Mercury. Tastefully designed two-story brick buildings and larger apartment buildings proliferated in Butte at the turn of the twentieth century to house the city’s exploding population. Large or growing middle- and upper-middle class families could occupy both floors as a single-family home, while widows, small families, or investors could divide the floors into three-room apartments. In 1909, widow Mary Kelly lived here with her sons, deputy county assessor Thomas Kelly and deputy sheriff John P. Kelly. By 1923, Mary and sons had moved to Park Street, and her daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Malcolm McLeod, were in residence. The building’s distinctive flat-arch clinker brick lintels above each window and relief diamond pattern belt course at the roofline reflected the upper-middle-class status of its occupants and fit in well among its decorative Queen Anne style neighbors.
]]>William H. and Eliza Norton’s elegant center-gabled brick home remains a symbol of the Norton’s substantial contributions in developing Columbus and Stillwater County. Built of local brick in 1899, the home, embellished by an ornate front porch, is still one of the most impressive residences in Columbus. The Nortons spared no expense, especially on the unusually sturdy load-bearing brick walls. At about thirty inches thick, the walls could have supported several more stories. Norton, nicknamed “Colonel,” arrived in Virginia City in 1866, taking jobs in farming, mining, and freighting. After the relocation of Crow Agency, south of Absarokee, in 1875 Norton opened a trading post with Horace Countryman near Columbus. In early July 1876, Norton relayed the first news of General Custer’s defeat at Little Bighorn to the Helena Herald; the story was picked up nationwide. Later that summer, he married Eliza Labey and worked at Crow Agency. After the arrival of the railroad in 1882, Colonel Norton built a mercantile, and in 1889 settled on lands that later became part of the townsite of Columbus. Over the next ten years, the Nortons established a sheep ranch and invested in the development of the local stone quarry, the opera house, the creamery, the flour mill, and the hospital. Colonel Norton served on many local boards and commissions and as territorial, then state, representative from Yellowstone County. After Stillwater County was created in 1913, the Nortons sold the courthouse block, including their home, to the county for $7,000.
]]>A few years after Livingston Memorial Hospital opened in February 1955, the Livingston Enterprise reported, “This neat, modern building will hold a prominent position in the lives of Livingston residents for years to come. For some it will be their birthplace and hold their first memories of medical attention. Its importance will last through their lives.” Indeed, the building remains a local landmark and enduring symbol of public-private investment. In the decades before Livingston Memorial, the Park County Poor Farm (1889), Saint Luke’s Hospital (1901), Park Hospital (1913), and several other private maternity and religious hospitals served healthcare needs in the community. Following World War II, a nationwide thirst for modern facilities sparked state and federal aid programs to improve public infrastructure. In December 1946, the Livingston Community Hospital Association formed to plan and fundraise for a new hospital. That same year, Congress passed the Hill-Burton Hospital Act, a monumental federal aid program that ultimately built or improved twenty-nine rural Montana hospitals. Livingston-area community members donated about $400,000 for this building; the project also received $276,645 in federal funds—the largest hospital grant given in Montana. Architects Ralph Cushing and Everett Terrell (CTA Architects) embraced key features of Modernism using long expanses of light and dark brick, deep roof overhangs, and minimal ornamentation. Sixty years later, federal loan funds and private donations again funded Livingston HealthCare, a new hospital facility east of town. In 2019, non-profit developer Homeword, Inc., revived this building using state grants and federal tax credits to convert it into thirty-four affordable housing units.
]]>Michigan-born attorney George Pierson and his wife Loretta moved to Red Lodge in 1894. Soon thereafter they purchased this lot, where they lived in a one-story cottage. After the Piersons decided to build this “Free Classic” Queen Anne style residence in 1903, C. C. Bowlen bought their original house and moved it a block south. The Piersons’ new eight-room home featured a Queen Anne style hipped-roof, cross-gabled plan and angled bay windows. It also had the decorative moldings and accented boxed eaves common to more classical styles. Unlike most married women of the era, Loretta worked outside the home as a teacher in 1910. In 1917, Charles and Meryl Draper purchased the house, which suited their prominent community position; Charles was a newspaper editor and publisher. In the 1970s, the house became infamous for its association with the “Red Lodge Five,” defendants in a notorious drug case. A fire, which according to local legend was set to destroy evidence, damaged the home. A 2004 remodel added the current two-story wraparound porch but carefully preserved traces of the fire that marked the original maple floors and staircase.
]]>Residents in the North Helena Valley thought the early morning smoke rising near Silver Creek on September 8, 1928, was a wildfire. They soon learned that David Gehring’s barn was burning. The fire destroyed the barn and, to add insult to injury, took the lives of five horses. The large board-and-batten barn with its sweeping catslide haymow was less than thirty years old and insured for only half the cost of a new replacement. Despite the lack of insurance, drought, and rough economic times, David hired carpenters to rebuild the barn right away. Professionally designed and built barns like this one were a departure from the rough-hewn, labor-intensive buildings that preceded them. The new barn reflects the modern era of barn building and uses dimensional lumber and lightweight balloon framing. Its self-supporting gambrel roof housed a voluminous loft with a pulley and fork system attached to the ridge beam for easy hay loading. In 1933, David further expanded his milk operation when he added a combination cattle barn, milk shed, and loafing shed to the south of the corral.
]]>Not long after Bartholomew Gehring built his stable, house, and hen house in the late 1860s, he built a substantial stone and log root cellar to augment the cellar beneath his home. Measuring five hundred square feet, the sunken stone walls and massive upper log walls served as an early day walk-in cooler. This building was crucial in the Gehrings’ initial success. It allowed them to store the fresh produce and other perishables that they sold to travelers along the road and delivered to the nearby communities of Silver, Helena, and Marysville. By the early 1890s, markets were changing, and the Gehrings saw better opportunities in raising livestock. Through the first decades of the 1900s, the family expanded its land holdings, constructed new buildings, and mechanized while consistently adding more chickens, cattle, and hogs. After the root cellar was converted for use as a hen house, the Gehrings built a timber-frame addition to accommodate a larger brood. As with other structures on the property, this building’s changing use points to the Gehrings’ tireless efforts over four generations to adapt, modernize, and sustain the ranch.
]]>Family accounts associate the bunkhouse with the original Auchard homestead north of the Gehring Ranch. The log skids on which it rests indicate that the building was mobile and a team of draft horses could have dragged it from the Auchard’s. Bunkhouses fill a common ranch need—housing for hired hands. Although most of the hired hands who stayed here tended to farm and ranch duties, carpenter Nelson Sherburne lived in the bunkhouse in 1900 while he remodeled the Gehring House. Sherburne may have introduced lath and plaster to the bunkhouse interior. Often hired men would eat in the rancher’s house to discuss the day’s accomplishments and work plans, but the bunkhouse afforded its occupants privacy and the comforts of a soft bed and warm stove. The pages of a 1928 magazine glued to the walls, a common thermal improvement of the time, attest to the building’s marginal comfort. Although the bunkhouse fell out of use when Gehring acquired another used bunkhouse in 1929, this original bunkhouse served as an occasional home for transient men in search of work during the Great Depression.
]]>Not all outhouses deserve interpretive signs, but the Gehring outhouse is an important local reminder of the U.S. government’s efforts in the 1930s to improve sanitation and public health in rural areas. Part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” the Works Progress Administration (WPA) was established during the Great Depression to employ vast numbers of jobless Americans and improve crumbling infrastructure. While the WPA is best known for large-scale building and infrastructure projects, its sanitation program was far reaching, with some 2.3 million outhouses built across the nation. These WPA outhouses remain easily recognizable, as they are all identical. The WPA provided the plans and labor, and the property owner provided the materials. On the outside, the plan dictated a four-foot-by-five-foot wood frame, an overhanging shed roof with a wide fascia board, and wood siding. Inside, a six-foot-deep concrete-lined vault held waste safely, and the concrete foundation and integrated molded concrete pot made it easy to keep clean. Last but not least, each outhouse had a square wood pipe to direct polluted air from the pot to the outside.
]]>Although the Gehring Ranch is known today as a cattle and bison operation, David Gehring introduced commercial hog production to the ranch in 1910, beginning a long partnership with the Montana Meat Co. in Helena. In his journal on May 27, 1910, Gehring recorded the acquisition of two young sows from his neighbors the Hardies. He established a hog pasture and by October laid stones for the foundation of this hog shed, which he completed in November, just in time for winter. Gehring tracked the details of the hog business, writing on March 25, 1911, “Hogs eat 2 ½ pounds grain per day each,” an apparent sign of a healthy litter to come. Just four days later, the first litter was born. As Gehring’s herd grew he added the log and hay-covered hog shelter. To produce needed hog feed, he built a water-powered feed mill to the south along Silver Creek in 1913, which he expanded in 1927. The ranch phased out hog production in the 1940s, but the now vacant shed, shelter, and towering feed mill remain as symbols of Gehring’s successful operation.
]]>Establishing a ranch in 1860s Montana required many hands. Help from relatives and friends and the able assistance of horses meant survival. This stable and the house are among the first buildings Bartholomew Gehring built. His brother, Frank, who homesteaded nearby, helped him harvest the logs and build the stable. While the stable had a hayloft and likely a small grain bin, it did not provide enough feed storage for a flourishing ranch. Shortly after receiving his final homestead papers in 1877, Gehring built a log granary to the southeast of the stable, which allowed him to add more stock and dedicate more acreage to feed grain. The granary follows a common plan: it is centrally positioned in the corrals and elevated on piers to resist ground moisture, invasive pests, and facilitate wagon bed loading. Inside, grain bins flank a central hall. As the Gehring family acquired more sophisticated buildings, the log stable fell out of use in the early 1900s and was near collapse by 2017. In 2018, Hal Harper and a crew of volunteers rescued the stable, restoring it to its original appearance.
]]>The Gehring house reflects the ranch’s growth from a pioneer log cabin to a modern twentieth-century family home. Bartholomew Gehring camped out under his wagon while building the first wing of this ranch house in 1865. In November 1871, he married Jane Auchard, the sister of his friend and neighbor David Auchard. A log addition followed when only son, David, was born in 1873. Soon after, they added a summer kitchen to the rear. Around 1900, a carpenter completed the tricky task of harmoniously joining the two log cabins and the kitchen under one roof and added clapboard siding and a front porch. Bartholomew died suddenly in a ranch accident on July 4, 1900, and Jane passed away in 1912. David married neighbor Ann Hardie in 1913, and children Ruth, Clifford, and Jack arrived over the next eleven years. In 1928, a carpenter enlarged their small cabin with a modern two-story rear addition, including a cellar, kitchen, and upstairs bedrooms. A concrete swimming pool, added at the same time, shows that the Gehrings took time for fun despite the hard work of ranch life.
]]>Successful farmers and ranchers need to know their crops, animals, and the markets, but they also must be mechanically inclined, resourceful, and self-reliant. This was especially true in the Gehring Ranch’s early days when a trip to the hardware store was an expensive daylong commitment. As the surviving objects still hanging in this shop demonstrate, almost nothing was disposable. The shop was essential to creating and maintaining the ranch’s basic elements. Here the Gehrings forged gate hardware, sharpened cutters, or repaired a double-tree hitch. If an object became obsolete, its remnants were kept for possible reuse elsewhere. The original log shop, built between 1871 and 1880 as a chicken coop, is a study in adaptation and reuse. When the Gehrings’ brood outgrew this building, the shop moved in. A substantial timber-frame addition came years later to accommodate a blacksmith shop complete with a brick forge and handmade workbench. The shop’s random mix of log notching styles and variable width board-and-batten siding illustrates the fact that the Gehrings constructed it as time and material allowed and valued the building more for its function than for its appearance.
]]>Civil engineer Bill Lowe designed and built this house for his family circa 1940. The modest-looking home has several features more typically found in high-style homes. These include the clay tile roof, decorative chimney caps, and a bow window, placed to take advantage of the corner lot. The multi-pane casement windows echo the windows of its grander architect-designed neighbors. Bill and Connie Lowe lived here until 1951 except during Bill’s twenty-two months in the Navy during World War II. On the family’s return to Billings, Connie resumed her role as a society hostess and active church and club woman. Although she had an education degree, she never taught as the school district did not hire married women. Bill became a principal in the construction firm responsible for many projects at MSU-Billings (then called Eastern Montana College), including Cisel, Apsaruke, and Rimrock Halls and the Physical Education Building. When the family outgrew this one-story home, the Lowes found another corner lot on which to build, where they constructed a larger, two-story home based on the same design.
]]>On December 5, 1875, Masons in Meagher County chartered Valley Lodge No. 21 (A.F. & A.M.) in Centerville, a farming community just north of present-day Townsend. The lodge moved to Townsend in 1884, shortly after the Northern Pacific Railroad platted the town. From 1884 to 1947 the Masons met in rented spaces, first over a store and then in the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) Hall. U.S. entry into World War II delayed their plans to construct their own building. Believing that it was more important to maintain “American Liberty” than to “consider our own comforts and pleasures," the lodge decided in January 1942 to invest the money it had saved for the building in defense bonds. After the war, Helena architect Herbert Jacobson designed the lodge in the Minimal Traditional style. More common to residences than public buildings, the style, which emphasized simplicity, grew out of the need for inexpensive but well-built homes. Although lacking the ornamentation seen on earlier Masonic temples, Jacobson’s design did incorporate two quintessential Masonic elements: a cornerstone with the Masonic symbol and a second-story, windowless room where the Masons could perform rituals away from the public eye. Contractors, working with Masonic volunteers, completed the building for $30,000. They used up-to-date materials that exemplified postwar vernacular architecture, including asbestos shingles on the exterior and, on the interior, vertical knotty pine tongue-and-groove wainscoting and fiberboard (Homasote) and plywood paneling. Dedicated in 1948, the temple served Lodge 21 until 2017.
]]>Women, and especially club women, played outsized roles in creating and maintaining the community institutions—churches, schools, and libraries—that they and their families valued. Providing an outlet for women to exercise their leadership skills, women’s clubs thrived in the late nineteenth century. By 1901, Montana alone boasted over fifteen women’s clubs, with at least one in every major town. Helene Dawson Edkins, a Blackfeet woman and the adopted daughter of one of East Glacier’s founding families, together with twenty-two other women, established the Glacier Park Woman’s Club on December 4, 1920. While some women’s clubs were stratified by race and class, the Glacier Park Woman’s Club welcomed all interested women. Initially, members took turns hosting meetings in their homes. In 1928, they acquired this lot from the Great Northern Railway. In 1933, they donated the site to Glacier County so that the county could commission the Civilian Conservation Corps-Indian Division (CCC-ID) to construct this saddle-notched log library and community hall. Part of the “Indian New Deal,” the CCC-ID employed 80,000 tribal members across the country to work to improve their reservations through pest control, weed eradication, and building projects, including dams, roads, fire lookouts, and other structures. The federally funded program could not perform work for private organizations, but after the hall was completed, the county deeded it back to the club. The hall is a good representation of Rustic architecture, a style associated both with park architecture and the CCC. The building continues to serve the community as a library, meeting space, and social center.
]]>Founded in 1882, a year after the area’s first silver strike, Neihart was nearly deserted by 1887. In 1891, the Great Northern Railway laid track connecting area mines to the Great Falls smelter, and investors and miners rushed back. On a hill south of town, Neihart built a four-room school. The student population followed mineral prices, rising and falling, then rising, falling, and rising again. By 1939, the need for a larger school was obvious. World War II ushered in Neihart’s last boom; even before the U.S. entered the war, the market grew for strategic metals, including lead and zinc. The school board sold $10,000 worth of bonds, purchased a site, and contracted with Great Falls architect George Shanley. The board rejected Shanley’s original design for a two-story brick building as too costly, ultimately settling on a one-story T-shaped log building. Even that proved too expensive. The Works Progress Administration—a federal government program to combat unemployment—paid for the labor, but even so, the building cost double the original bond. Funding issues delayed completion until 1941, when 224 students enrolled in the new school. Built from logs harvested from nearby King’s Hill, the Rustic-style building featured running water, reliable heat, science labs, larger and more classrooms, and a gymnasium/auditorium. In 1945, the Great Northern abandoned its Little Belts line, leaving mines and concentrators without a way to transport ore. The population plummeted. The high school closed in 1963. In 1981, the 19 remaining elementary students also transferred to Belt School and the building became the Neihart Senior Center.
]]>Built in 1916 and named for the patron saint of Czechoslovakia, St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church is a testament to the tightly knit community of Czech homesteaders who settled in Danvers and the surrounding area. The Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad platted Danvers during construction of its line between 1912 and 1914. The completed railroad and the promise of 320 acres of free land under the Enlarged Homestead Act lured prospective farmers, and the population of Fergus County expanded rapidly. Many new settlers arrived from Central and Southern Europe, and by 1920 roughly half of the residents in the Danvers area were Czech and most engaged in farming. By 1915, Danvers bustled with a combination hardware store and dance hall, saloon, hotel and restaurant, barber shop, cobbler, blacksmith, post office, butcher, livery stable, lumberyard, and grain elevator. In 1915, Catholic residents raised $2,650 from community members to build a church. Carpenter Frank Snider oversaw construction, and the congregation pitched in to excavate the basement and complete the interior. Through its long history, St. Wenceslaus Catholic Church was the heart of Danvers, serving as the religious and social center of the community for over eighty years. In 2010, the Friends of St. Wenceslaus—following in the footsteps of their Czech ancestors—raised funds from the local community and restored the church for use as an events center. Though only a few residents and buildings remain in Danvers, St. Wenceslaus church still stands as a beacon on the prairie, representing hard work, commitment, and community.
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