Rows of wood-frame houses lined West Daly Street by 1884 when it was still part of Chickentown, a Walkerville suburb. By 1891, Walkerville had absorbed Chickentown, and this house was the only brick-clad home on West Daly. Butcher Louis T. Gainor and wife Julia purchased the home in 1898, later adding a two-story rear addition by 1916 and stucco cladding after 1930. Louis, a successful meat market owner, served one term as Walkerville mayor in 1902-03. He owned one of Butte’s first cars, and his custom-made White Steamer runabout nearly won the Montana State Fair’s first-ever auto race in 1906. He narrowly lost when it burst into flames. In 1914, Julia joined one hundred local women campaigning against women’s suffrage. The group declared that giving women the right to vote was “progressive only in name” because of the “great responsibilities which it would add to the already manifold duties and responsibilities in woman’s life.” Louis and Julia shared the home with their daughter Virginia and son-in-law William Hunter until they died in the 1940s. Virginia and William remained in residence until 1959.
]]>In 1891, Swiss-Italian immigrant Peter Schonsberg established his residence and grocery store in a one-story wood-frame building built in 1884. Peter, wife Pacifica, and six children lived in the western third while the store occupied the eastern two-thirds. In 1900, contractors jacked up the building and placed a full-story stone foundation under it. They also built up the stone house to the west and attached the false-front stone building on the east, where Peter opened a saloon. Peter died in 1915 at age fifty-nine and Pacifica died at age forty-two in 1916. Their married daughter Adeline Rodoni raised her five younger siblings (and her children), while husband Julius and partner Felix Tatti ran the store and saloon. Prohibition closed the saloon, but by 1920, Schonsberg’s oldest son Valerio, his wife Lizzie, and sister Linda were operating the grocery store, while the extended family lived upstairs. Valerio reopened the saloon after 1933, running it until he retired in 1971. Lizzie and daughter Valerie established The Alpine Bar in Meaderville in the mid-1940s. After Lizzie died in 1969, Valerie kept The Alpine until her death in 2010.
]]>The second story of this residence, built circa 1884, dates to Walkerville’s formative days. Irish native John Dreeland may have been the first resident. He immigrated to the U.S. in 1869 to pursue mining. By 1884, he had settled on still-developing West Daly Street and was a partner in Butte’s Montana Union Publishing Co. In 1886, he opened the Butte Brewery Depot saloon. The next year, he and George Pascoe patented the nearby Colonel Sellers vein, a manganese mine. John, wife Bridget, and their three children lived here in 1900 when copper king William A. Clark funded construction of Butte’s streetcar line into Walkerville via West Daly Street. To build the line, contractors had to lower the street level by 2.5 feet. Some homeowners added retaining walls and stairs to their front property line, while others, like Dreeland and Peter Schonsberg next door, jacked up their wood-frame homes and built new stone walls under their existing buildings. After 1907, a succession of Italian families lived here. Timber contractor Maggiorino “Mudge” Tamietti and wife Sadie were long-time residents from 1931 until Sadie’s death in 1965.
]]>Simple four-room worker cottages like this one provided basic accommodations for miners. This well-preserved example, built circa 1890, retains its original footprint, wood windows and doors, and lapped wood siding. It originally included two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and an outhouse near the alley. Life for miners was often rough. John B. Kelly, in residence from 1898 to 1900, was badly beaten and left for dead following a night of drinking in September 1898. John’s friends found him alive in a prospect hole with serious head injuries and a fractured collar bone. In 1902, miner Michael Reed, his wife Mary, and their two children moved here. The Reeds had three more children and, in 1912, were hosting two boarders when Michael died of tuberculosis. Then, in 1914, Mary died of diabetes. Initially, Michael’s sister Mary Casey cared for the children and rented this house to other miners. By the mid-1920s she and the Reed children had returned to live here and at No. 12 next door. The oldest sibling, Thomas Reed and his wife Agnes, lived here from 1934 to 1971.
]]>The masonry buildings in the heart of Walkerville reflect the town’s nineteenth-century silver-mining roots. Mining investors, the Walker Brothers of Salt Lake, and future copper king Marcus Daly began developing silver mines here in 1876. Joseph Broughton, another Salt Lake investor, likely built this substantial brick general store in 1880. By 1883, John Caplice and Alfred McCune acquired the building and in 1884 emblazoned “Caplice & McCune” high on the south wall. Silver markets slumped in 1893, and by 1897, St. Lawrence Catholic Church, a branch of St. Patrick’s in Uptown Butte, temporarily held services here while building a new church nearby. It later used the building to house St. Joseph’s Parochial School. In 1905, Mount Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church acquired and remodeled the building, adding pointed arch windows in the auditorium, a central meeting room, and a rear, six-room apartment for the pastor. The congregation was always small compared to Mountain View Methodist in Uptown Butte, and for many years it shared pastors with Centerville, Silver Bow Park, Wesley Chapel, and Meaderville. Despite their limited numbers, Walkerville Methodists worshipped here until 1972.
]]>Shortly after F. J. Brule’s 1906 survey, Walkerville carpenter Ed Reimel built this one-and-one-half-story, brick-veneered home with extended eaves and a hipped roof dormer with flared ends. Victorian elements include beveled glass windows in the gable end, segmented arch accents over the windows, and a hairpin fence providing symbolic protection from the outside world. Cornish immigrants John and Mary Rich were the first owners. John worked as a bookkeeper. He was also bandmaster for the Alice Mine and Mill Band and secretary of the Musicians Mutual Protective Union. In 1917, as a musician at the Rialto Theater, he doubtless played the sound tracks for silent movies. Mary was in women’s groups including the Miriam Rebekah Lodge #3 and the Walkerville Circle #547, Neighbors of Woodcraft. In 1924 the Riches moved down the street to a smaller home. From 1925 to the 1940s, this was home to William Richards, co-lessee of the Goldsmith Mine, and his wife Bessie and their four children. Their daughter Lavina lived here until 1990.
]]>Joseph Walker, president of the Alice Gold and Silver Mine, platted the streets near his mine to provide convenient housing for mine workers. However, when he sold the lots, he kept the mineral rights. By separating mineral rights from property rights, the mining company retained permission to tunnel beneath area homes, a fact that deterred home owners from investing heavily in their houses. By 1891, a shotgun house stood here, part of a crowded residential block. Saloonkeeper John French purchased the property in 1892, which soon accommodated a one-story hipped-roof cottage. A second small home and an outbuilding with an attached chicken coop stood behind the main house. By 1910, French had left the saloon business to deliver coal and wood by wagon. He and his wife Cassie occupied the front house while brothers Dan and James Caddigan, both miners, lived in the back house. After John died in 1912, Cassie remained in residence until 1921, when she sold the property to Ursulla Hawthorn. During the 1960s, as part of “urban renewal,” the city demolished the rear house and outbuildings.
]]>Beveled lap siding, turned porch supports, and a spindle frieze decorate this functional, working-class residence, built circa 1896. The hipped-roof cottage was home to the Kelly family for over seventy years. Irish miner Cornelius Kelly and his wife Julia owned the home free of mortgage by 1900, but Cornelius did not have long to enjoy his piece of the American dream. He died in 1907 of chronic bronchitis. Caused in large part by breathing the quartz dust produced by drilling and end-of-shift explosions, lung diseases were an occupational hazard. Historians estimate that lung diseases killed between a third and a half of Butte’s hard rock miners. In 1910 widow Julia supported herself and her children—Jerry 13, Michael 12, and Virginia 11—by providing room and board for her brother and brother-in-law. By 1920, “Verge” worked as a stenographer and both Michael and Jerry had become miners. All three lived at home. In 1940, the children still lived with their mother, who undoubtedly relied on their incomes. Jerry was the last Kelly in residence; he sold the home in 1971.
]]>Almost a quarter of the buildings in Walkerville are four-square, hip-roof residences, what housing catalogs called “workingman’s cottages.” Quick and inexpensive to build, they provided homes for Walkerville miners and their families. Roughly a third of those miners emigrated from England, many of them from the copper mining district of Cornwall. James and Edith Burnett lived here by 1910, with their two children and two of James’s older brothers, John and Steven. All three men worked as miners. Their father was originally from Cornwall, but the brothers grew up in Lancashire, where their dad mined iron. John was the first of the brothers to seek his fortune in Butte, leaving England in 1898. James was next, arriving in Butte in 1902, followed by Edith and the children in 1906, and Steven in 1909. It seems that James left the mining life behind as quickly as he could. By 1920, the family had moved to Oakland, California, where James worked as a railroad machinist. By that year, another family of English immigrants occupied the residence: fifty-three year-old miner William Rowe and his wife Martha.
]]>In 1880, when Joseph Broughton arrived in Walkerville, the booming silver town was a relatively isolated settlement. The Walker brothers—for whom the town is named—had purchased the Alice Mine only four years earlier with the help of their agent, future copper king Marcus Daly. With the Walkers' backing, Broughton opened a store at the corner of Daly and Main, where he sold everything from peanuts to threshing machines. Broughton, who lived in an apartment above the store, also served as Walkerville's postmaster, and his mercantile became a community focal point. Butte soon overshadowed the small silver town, but low prices and quality goods kept Broughton's customers loyal even after streetcars gave Walkerville residents easy access to Butte's large shopping district. Between 1891 and 1900, Broughton replaced his pre-1884 building with this stone-and-brick structure. A stepped wooden cornice with scrolled brackets adorns the building, whose canted corner entrance welcomes customers from both Daly and Main.
]]>Bishop Brondel created Butte’s second Catholic parish, that of St. Lawrence O’Toole, in 1897. Constructed with $25,000 raised by miners’ subscription on land donated by the Butte and Boston Mining Company, the Gothic Revival style church was completed that year in time for Christmas Day mass. Although a central steeple has been removed, the wood-frame building remains as excellent example of period ecclesiastical architecture, featuring exquisite fresco paintings (circa 1906) on its interior wood-beamed ceiling. The exterior was painted white in the 1960s for the filming of an episode of the television series “Route 66.” The St. Lawrence Preservation Committee, founded in 1988, maintains this architectural treasure for the community.
]]>The younger brother of Walkerville merchants Joseph and George Broughton, James lived with George after arriving in the booming silver camp, sometime before 1885. Among his many jobs, James worked as a bartender, clerk, whisky distilling agent, traveling salesman, and for many years was Walkerville’s city treasurer. When he and his wife, Sarah, moved into this Queen Anne cottage, he was serving as vice president of the Musicians Mutual Protective Union. Sarah and James likely had this home built for them circa 1907, the same year the streetcar company completed its line up Excelsior and along Daly Street. Gingerbread and fish-scale shingles decorate the gable end of the residence's polygonal bay. Behind the decorative bay is a hipped roof house, whose practical form typifies the working-class homes that line Walkerville's streets. Living here with the Broughtons was their daughter, Martha, a teacher and then the principal of Sherman Elementary School. Later residents included miner Paul Richards and his wife Florence 1929-1931 and Mountain States Telephone and Telegraph employee John Griffiths and his wife Hazel 1932-1939.
]]>Little evidence survives today of the industrial giant that once consumed this neighborhood. By 1889 when the first cable car ran on an impressive trestle to the north above the settlement, the Moulton and Alice mines were fully developed and Walkerville was an industrial hub. By this time, Canadian-born George Dent was already in business at this location. Hundreds of miners, especially from Cornwall, England, lived and worked in this Butte suburb and frequented Dent’s small shop. From at least 1889 until his death in 1936, George Dent was a veritable institution, clipping and shaving Walkerville’s miners. An early photograph shows Dent’s front-room, one-chair barbershop ornately wallpapered and lavishly decorated with photographs and female pinups, no doubt to keep the miners busy as Dent worked his transformations. Three large front windows and two more on the west allowed his workspace ample daylight. The family occupied the rear, where Dent and his wife raised two sons. Now clad in metal siding, this wood-frame home rests on a sturdy granite foundation and its original footprint is wholly intact.
]]>It took millions of miles of copper to build the telegraph, telephone, and electrical lines that transformed the United States from a collection of small, isolated communities to a cohesive, industrialized nation. Looming gallows frames and the towering Anaconda Company smokestack recall the industrial roots of these sister cities, the source of much of that copper. Extracting the metal was hazardous work, and the danger bred solidarity among miners and smelterworkers. Two of the nation’s most radical unions had their roots in Butte and Walkerville, “The Gibraltar of Unionism.” They were the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World, whose rhetoric opposing “wage slavery” challenged the foundations of American capitalism. Clashes between capitalism and labor marked the district, especially after the 1917 Butte Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine fire, the worst hard-rock mining disaster in the nation’s history. Labor unrest and years under martial law followed in Butte, while in Anaconda, the Company fired suspected Socialists and agitators, devastating the unions. Butte and Anaconda workers reorganized during the New Deal after the federal government guaranteed the right of workers to unionize. Their four-month industry-wide strike in 1934 precipitated the birth of the CIO, an organization that helped rejuvenate the labor movement nationwide. In 2006, the National Park Service recognized Butte, Anaconda, and Walkerville’s significance to the intertwined histories of mining and labor by declaring the district a National Historic Landmark. It is the largest NHL in the West, covering the period 1876-1934 and encompassing nearly 10,000 acres with over 6,000 contributing resources.
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