After fire destroyed most of this side of Main Street in 1886, Chicago lawyer and financier James A. Danforth invested in building this double-front, brick commercial building. The original façade featured tall plate-glass windows divided by central and side entrances and was topped by a tasteful, stepped parapet. The building’s first tenant was clothing merchant Henry Frank. Frank moved into a new building next door in 1891. The next fifty years brought a variety of restaurants and saloons, including several Chinese restaurants between 1906 and 1927. The Fraternal Order of Eagles (F.O.E.) purchased the building in 1947. Livingston’s first Aerie No. 273 was established in 1902. In exchange for their charitable efforts (and membership dues), F.O.E. members received free medical care, an illness stipend, and a funeral benefit. Aerie No. 273 disbanded during the Great Depression, but renewed interest after World War II drew 119 charter members to the Yellowstone Park Aerie No. 2434. The Eagles modernized the façade of their new home with stucco and glass block windows and remodeled the interior. The Eagles Club remained a fixture on Main Street through 1980.
]]>The full-width front porch, low-pitched roof with wide overhangs, and prominent corbelled (stepped) brick chimney are key elements of this 1913 Craftsman bungalow. Multi-pane sidelights flanking the door match the transom atop the main window and dormer windows, unifying the façade. In the 1910s, middle-class families like that of real estate agent J. O. Terrell and wife Prudence sought out the North Elevation neighborhood for its modern homes, parklike setting, fenced backyards, and one-car garages. The Terrells lived here from 1913 to 1926. By the 1950s, the neighborhood attracted young families just starting out. In 1951, Bob and Hattie Martin purchased this house for $18,000 calling 1111 home for over fifty years. Bob was a traveling salesman and Hattie raised four children and worked as a school nurse. When her children went to college, she went too, earning her nursing degree at Montana State University-Bozeman in 1970. Hattie became county director of nurses, local Red Cross director, volunteered for a month in 1975 at Camp Pendleton nursing Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees, and helped establish the Yellowstone County Adult Resource Alliance.
]]>German immigrants Louis “Lee” and Christina Freudenstein built this handsome two-story Queen Anne style home on three lots across from St. Patrick’s Church in 1889. The low-profile hipped roof and modest entry porch with turned posts reflect the Freudensteins’ taste for restrained architectural detail at a time when exuberant ornamentation was the norm. The Freudensteins came to Butte from Chicago in 1882 after Louis inherited his uncle’s Germania mine where, beginning in 1886, workers struck rich silver veins. Lee amassed a fortune and invested in other mining ventures and real estate, including the boardinghouse next door. After silver prices crashed in 1893, Lee struggled financially, dying in 1899 and leaving Christina and their seven children debt-ridden. By 1910, Christina had sold this house to Daniel and Sarah Thomas and moved with her grown children to her boardinghouse next door. The Thomases took boarders into their home and eventually bought Christina’s boardinghouse as well. Daniel and Sarah were active members of the local Masons and Order of the Eastern Star. Daniel died in 1922, but Sarah continued managing both properties until her death in 1941.
]]>Wholesale liquor dealer John V. Collins commissioned this handsome Renaissance Revival style commercial and boardinghouse building in 1897. The store was home to several saloons during its first twenty years. Workers at Marcus Daly’s Anaconda Company Smelter cashed their paychecks next door at Daly’s bank and some quenched their thirst in this building or the one next door. Upstairs, various female landlords managed an ever-changing array of bachelor tenants. In 1919, the Anaconda Company bought the building and hired Bozeman architect Fred Willson to redesign the storefront and former saloon into a more refined business office and community meeting space. Pay Office Hall served smelter employees payroll needs during the day, and hosted social, civic, and labor union meetings at night. The second floor lodging rooms soon filled with labor union offices representing a wide array of blue-collar workers including butchers, railroad workers, iron workers, bricklayers, and plumbers. In 1948, the Anaconda Standard newspaper offices in the Petritz Block next door moved their advertising staff here. Since 1970, the Anaconda Leader has produced the town’s weekly newspaper from this location.
]]>E. F. Johnson likely built this shotgun-plan log home by 1869. Like many of his neighbors he eagerly embraced the trappings of civilization. Circa 1875 he, or the next owner, William Thompson, covered the cabin’s logs with clapboard siding, probably attaching the kitchen addition at the same time. The home’s multi-pane windows reflect the difficulties of transporting even small panes of glass, carefully wrapped in sawdust, by wagon train from Salt Lake City. P. A. Largey, a freighter who arrived in Virginia City in 1865, purchased the residence in 1888, as an investment property. By then Largey had moved to Butte, where he owned Butte Hardware Company, the State Savings Bank of Butte, the Brush Electric and Power Company, and much real estate. He also owned multiple mines, lumber companies, and paper mills in Montana and Idaho. Largey’s estate sold the property in 1911 to Matilda Johnson, who lost it to the county for back taxes during the Great Depression. Sometime after 1990, owners enamored with the pioneer past removed the clapboard to expose the original logs.
]]>The Heritage Museum is a tribute to Libby’s community spirit and commitment to preserving its history. Constructed almost entirely by volunteer labor, the log structure celebrates the region’s forests and logging roots. Community members began imagining a museum in 1971 to display the paintings and extensive artifact collection of Libby landscape artist and collector Roy Porter. The nation’s upcoming bicentennial provided additional motivation to build the museum. Porter’s son Doug became president of the museum’s volunteer board, which also envisioned creating a repository for other local history collections as well as a community archive. Floyd Lucas, a structural engineer who worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers at the Libby Dam, designed the Neotraditional Rustic style museum. The unusual, twelve-sided building features a 130-foot-diameter first floor and a 30-foot-diameter cupola. National Forest landscape architect Wayne Tlusty created a site plan. Other community members dug the well and excavated the basement while electrical engineer John Davidson, who also worked for the Corps, designed and completed the museum’s electrical system. Local loggers felled and skidded between eight and nine hundred larch and lodgepole pines donated to the county for the project by the Kootenai National Forest. Donated trucks delivered the logs to the site, where still other volunteers hand-peeled and notched the logs to prepare them for assembly. Libby High School students built the large front doors in their shop class. The building’s shell was completed as planned by the July 4, 1976, bicentennial. The museum’s forty-one interior exhibits opened to the public two years later.
]]>Benjamin Mahan, pioneer businessman and respected Deer Lodge County Commissioner, opened his first paint and wallpaper store on Main Street in 1885. He later moved to this one-story brick building in April 1916. The store’s distinctive buff-colored brick combined with the contrasting white brick panel in the parapet wall made the small store stand out amongst its older red brick neighbors. Mahan’s store was Anaconda’s source for everything from paint and wallpaper to auto body paint, picture frames, and small appliances. By the mid-1920s, the store sold battery-powered radios and later offered in-home installation when corded (electric) radios were new technology. Mahan died in 1928, but his son-in-law, Fraser Smith, operated the store here until 1938. That year, dentists Earl Turton and Wilbur Beal opened their offices in the front, while the Works Progress Administration (WPA), operated a mattress factory in the rear. This Great Depression-era government relief program made use of surplus cotton and trained jobless men and women to sew mattresses. The Anaconda factory, along with one in Great Falls, made 10,000 mattresses for the needy by 1940.
]]>Prosperous Deer Lodge Valley rancher George Parrot invested $13,000 to build the Parrot Block in 1896. The first story of this well-appointed Queen Anne style commercial and boardinghouse building originally featured tall, plate-glass display windows topped by a wide grid of small prism-glass tiles. The well-preserved second story reflects the period’s taste for rich and varied textures and showcases the bricklayer’s masterful work. A central stained-glass transom window originally attracted attention to the building’s cast-iron nameplate above it. The crenelated parapet and granite details still lend an air of imposing permanence. Lodgers and businesses rented the upstairs rooms while some of Anaconda’s best-known retailers occupied the storefronts below. The Goodfriend Clothing Co., the Kelly Commercial Co. grocery store, and other retailers operated here in the early 1900s. F. W. Woolworth’s five-and-dime store occupied the building from the mid-1930s to 1958. MacIntyre’s, in business in Anaconda since 1909, sold clothing here from 1960 to 2004. In 2006, new owners renovated the building and renamed it the Francisco Building, in honor of Robert and Mary Francisco, who owned MacIntyre’s for more than twenty years.
]]>Beginning with gold strikes in the 1860s and continuing through the homestead years into the 1920s, Montanans built more than 2,600 rural schoolhouses. Settlers squatting on Crow lands in the Fishtail Basin near present-day Dean began educating their children here in a one-room log cabin in 1894. The school served area children for twenty years, until fire gutted the building on a cold March day in 1914. Before fire engulfed the building, teacher Miss Schwenneker and the older children quickly removed all the furnishings, including part of the chalkboard. School resumed in a nearby granary. In 1915, Mary Doane and her great nephew Clarence Rich donated land for a new school and playground, and community members built a modern education building for Dean residents. The new school was nothing like the former dimly lit, rough-hewn log school. Polished maple floors, high ceilings clad with decorative (and fireproof) tin panels, a spacious cloakroom, tall windows flooding the room with natural light, and a small but comfortable, attached teacherage (apartment) transformed school, social, and civic life for the community. Children in grades one through eight learned together during the day, and on weekends and evenings community members gathered for parties, elections, lectures, and club and association meetings. Beloved teacher Delores Haas directed the school from 1954 until it closed in 1967. Since then the Dean Community Club has used the building for social events. A full rehabilitation in 2018 returned the Dean School to its original appearance.
]]>After building the St. Jean Block next door in 1893, Dr. Felix St. Jean again hired respected Anaconda mason John Cosgrove to build this annex building in 1897. Cosgrove, an old friend of Marcus Daly’s, also built the foundations of the Upper Works of the Anaconda Company smelter and many prominent masonry buildings on Main Street and East Park Avenue. The original storefront housed Dr. St. Jean’s Standard Drug Company until 1900 when optician and jeweler L. F. Verbeckmoes moved in. Other early twentieth-century upstairs tenants included Mabel Smith’s Embroidery Shop, the John Hillberg Photo Studio, and Anaconda’s first chiropractor, Dr. R. D. Sawtell. In 1903, wealthy Billings mercantile owners Christian and Peter Yegen opened the Yegen Bros. Savings Bank here, later incorporating as the National Bank of Anaconda in 1905. In 1915, the Yegen brothers added an exuberant Neoclassical façade featuring fluted stone columns with Ionic capitals, tall divided-light transom windows, a polished terra-cotta tile entablature with the bank name, and a stately copper paneled door surround. It remains one of Anaconda’s best examples of Neoclassical design.
]]>Until the arrival of large discount grocery chains after World War II, numerous grocery businesses thrived in Anaconda. Some merchants sold a vast array of goods, and others specialized in dry goods, produce, or meat. Many groceries catered to specific ethnic groups. Thorsen Bros. grocery next door served the Norwegian community. Otto Kretzer’s Washoe Meat Market, a few doors east, offered a variety of meats and German sausages, and French-Canadians Albert MacCallum and August Cloutier’s “French Store” in this building appealed to residents in Frenchtown. Their general store started here in a small wood-frame building in 1885. The business grew quickly, and the partners expanded the building by 1888, adding a warehouse to the rear, a saloon next door, and brick veneer cladding. By 1895, MacCallum and Cloutier took over the saloon space, and added another warehouse. Just three years later, they built an enormous two-story brick building across Chestnut Street. In 1915, this building’s longest-lived business opened. The Metropolitan Meat Market provided fresh meat products to Anacondans until 1952.
]]>Dillon’s first railroad hotel, the Hotel Metlen, opened to much fanfare in 1898. However, by 1917 rapidly changing expectations of comfort and style spurred successful sheep rancher Harry Andrus to build a new, $150,000 hotel in the heart of Dillon’s business district. Andrus hired Seattle architect Jesse Warren to design a thoroughly modern and elegant Renaissance Revival style building. In his correspondence to Warren, Andrus said, “I made my money in Beaverhead County and I want to build a hotel in Dillon; the best is none too good for Beaverhead County people.” He spared no expense. The lobby, which was large enough to host dances and other community celebrations, boasted a red marble staircase with a decorative wood balustrade, stained glass windows, faux plaster classical columns, and an elevator. The ground floor included a restaurant, bar, bank, and billiard parlor. The second floor held thirty rooms and the Andrus family’s spacious suite. Most of the rooms featured carpets and private bathrooms, while every room had a telephone. The third-floor rooms hosted long-term tenants and salesman’s showrooms. When the hotel opened in February 1918, the Dillon Tribune wrote that Andrus gave “to Dillon, her people and her visitors one of the finest, most modern and best-equipped hotels in the entire northwest.” Andrus managed the hotel until his death in 1941. It proved far more than just a place for visitors to stay; it became a community institution where businesses and civic organizations held important meetings, banquets, charity sales, and other social functions.
]]>Missoula architect A. J. Gibson replicated this row house apartment building’s architectural details from an almost identical building he designed on South Second Street. Contractor David Andrews built both buildings in the early 1900s to meet Missoula’s growing demand for housing. The quiet south side especially grew in popularity after the arrival of the Milwaukee Railroad in 1908. Both buildings feature two projecting front bays, an appealing way to bring more light into the front rooms of the attached apartments. Ionic columns support the open front porches, which are topped by second-floor balconies, giving each apartments’ occupants access to outdoor space. The prominent cornices and the two circular windows, centered on the second-floor façades and encircled by keystone brickwork, add visual interest. Each apartment has its own door, an implicit answer to fears expressed by moralists that apartments encouraged promiscuity by allowing unmarried people to access one another’s residences through interior hallways. In 1920, tenants in this building included a carpenter and his family, a stenographer and her mother, a female bookkeeper, and a young civil engineer and his wife and child.
]]>Italian stonemason Michael Jacobs built this outstanding Eclectic style house for his family in 1907. Born Michelangelo Jacobucci, Jacobs apprenticed in Vinchiaturo, Italy, before joining his brother Gabriel in the United States circa 1878. The brothers soon found work in Chicago, where Michael also attended night school in architecture. In 1901, the Montana Sandstone Company recruited Jacobs to become foreman of the Columbus quarry, best known for providing the stone for the Montana state capitol. By 1906, he had become superintendent. He later formed Stillwater Monumental Works, which created ornately carved cemetery markers. Jacobs’ skill and building trades connections are apparent in the sandstone residence. In 1906, Jacobs shared a floorplan his wife Hannah had sketched with noted Helena architect J. G. Link and asked Link to draw up plans. In 1907, when orders were slow, he kept his quarrymen busy cutting stone for the house. Huge sandstone blocks from Jacobs’ quarry form the exterior walls. Jacobs likely carved the intricate sandstone details himself, including the decorative flowers and scrollwork, balustrades, finials, and a carved lion’s head, which functions as a downspout. The home’s Renaissance Revival elements include its low-pitched, hipped roof, Corinthian columns, and arched windows. The most prominent decorative feature is the curvilinear stone parapet. The parapet’s shape, if not its material, mimics those found on Spanish Colonial style missions. Jacobs may have encountered the style at the 1893 Columbian Exposition, where the design of the California Building brought it to public attention.
]]>Fred Bottler came to Montana over the Bozeman Trail in 1865, moving circa 1868 to the Upper Yellowstone, where he and brother Phil claimed 320 acres. Fred was a commercial hunter, supplying thousands of wolf pelts and elk hides to the New York market. An avid explorer who claimed to have visited Yellowstone’s Fire Hole Basin in 1866, Fred also served as guide and hunter for the 1872 Hayden Expedition. This is his fifth documented residence on the ranch, his share of which grew to over 1,700 acres. The first house was a primitive bachelor shanty. Early guidebooks described Fred’s second residence, the 1874 two-story frame hotel where he lived with mother Catherine and two brothers, as the “last abode of civilization.” Opened to serve Yellowstone Park visitors, the hotel prospered until the 1883 completion of a railroad line from Bozeman to Gardiner. In 1880 Fred married Josie Shorthill and the couple, seeking privacy, built the tidy log cabin where their two children were born. When the federal government banned most hunting in the park in 1883, Fred and Josie turned to sheep ranching; in 1893 they built a grand twenty-one-room Victorian mansion as a testament to their success. After a fire destroyed that home in 1904, they rebuilt on a more modest but still elegant scale. The gable-front-and-wing, “Free Classic” Queen Anne style residence features the jumble of rooflines typical of the Queen Anne style and the boxed cornices and minimalist detailing found in Neoclassical style homes.
]]>Successful Irish immigrant Frank Stephens built this prominent, Queen Anne style retail and boardinghouse block in 1891. Stephens chose the Park and Montana location because the basement was already dug. He wrote a check for $499 for the “hole in the ground” on May 4, 1889. The building’s richly ornamented corner turret, decorative cast-iron pilasters (flat columns), and soaring plate-glass windows represented the height of fashion. The thirty-two-room Stephen’s Hotel operated as a boardinghouse and apartments for decades. The upper floors remain in near original condition, with few modern improvements made over the last century. In fact, the upper two floors still have only one bath and one water closet (toilet) per floor. The main floor and basement were home to many successful businesses including Lutey’s Grocers, one of the first self-serve grocery stores in Butte. Below the sidewalks, Joseph Richards, the Butte Undertaker, operated one of Butte’s first undertaking businesses until 1908. When Frank Stephens died in 1898, he was laid in state in the hall at the top of the first flight of stairs.
]]>Charles Garnier—Livingston mayor and cigar manufacturer—teamed up with businessman, brick manufacturer, and real estate developer A. W. Miles to construct this dignified addition to the commercial district. They hired one of the architects responsible for the Montana State Capitol, C. E. Bell, in 1903, but they delayed construction until 1904 so that Miles could focus on rebuilding another of his commercial blocks after a disastrous fire. Bell’s dignified design features pressed brick laid to suggest stonework. Above the second story, decorative brackets appear to support a cast iron cornice. The first story—once almost entirely dominated by plate-glass display windows—has been remodeled several times, but the original carved sandstone entrance remains on Callender Street. Rightly proud of their building, Garnier and Miles not only had their names carved in sandstone above the decorative entryway, but they placed them in metal atop the building on the parapet. They also had their names pressed into the sidewalk along with the words “Smoke Montana Sport”—Garnier’s most popular brand of cigars.
]]>The four buildings that make up this small historic district show the growth of Dillon’s city government. Buildings include ones constructed in the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the 1960s, when the city built a shelter for one of its water wells. The 1914 city hall displays the Progressive Era’s optimism, practicality, and belief in government as a force for good. The building housed a variety of municipal functions, including the fire and police departments, water commission, and city clerk’s office; large openings onto East Center Street mark the former fire-engine bays. The design also included a city council meeting room, living quarters for firefighters, a municipal jail, and a large public auditorium. The latter provided space for lectures, dances, fraternal meetings, boxing and wrestling matches, and theatrical productions. Bozeman architect Fred F. Willson designed the dignified Romanesque Revival style building with decorative brickwork patterns, projecting arched hood molds, and fanlight windows. The effect was a building decorative enough to instill public pride and modest enough to indicate fiscal responsibility. As Dillon grew, the city expanded on the lots behind the main building. In 1936-37, using funds from the Works Progress Administration, a New Deal federal jobs program, a shop was constructed behind city hall. It served as a police garage, shop, and storage, and included space to house the jail’s female prisoners. When the city needed more space, particularly for fire equipment, this shop was added onto, and another garage/shop was built and added onto in 1945 and again in 1975.
]]>James Patrick McCrossin, a Canadian immigrant, constructed this two-room cabin in 1908. McCrossin harvested and peeled western larch, generally less than a foot in diameter, before notching and assembling the hand-hewn logs. He then filled the large gaps between logs with slender, hand-cut rails and mortar. Atypically, the roof, supported by extra rafters, extends eight feet past the cabin walls on both gable ends to create sheltered, functional outdoor space. Unusual for a rustic cabin is the interior molding and trim, likely manufactured at a local mill. James, who worked as a teamster, farmer, and road worker, lived here with wife Ethel until circa 1912. The second of the couple’s six children was born while they were in residence. There was no electricity, running water, or indoor plumbing and the family likely hauled water from the nearby creek for drinking, washing, and cooking. Built during the apple boom, the cabin stands in contrast to the roomier Craftsman style houses being constructed at the same time in nearby Hamilton. It stands in even greater contrast to the opulent Daly Mansion being remodeled just seven miles north of the cabin. After the McCrossins moved out circa 1912, newlyweds, small families, and other short-term residents followed. In 1945 Sam and Alice Foss purchased the land, which was adjacent to acreage they already owned. Hired hands periodically lived in the cabin over the next fifteen years. The cabin is among the few remaining hand-built log structures used as temporary residences by Montana’s rural families in search of a better tomorrow.
]]>Ben Holladay’s Overland Stage opened here in 1864 with stages arriving and departing from this site for connections all over the West and the States. Bought out by Wells Fargo and Company in 1866, the office also housed the telegraph. Thirty years later, rail travel had eclipsed stage travel, so the telegraph office moved two doors east. In 1899, Simeon Buford, owner of the 1878 brick grocery store on the left and the matching 1886 grocery warehouse on the right, demolished the office building to expand his grocery business. His new connector building originally represented a modern store design compared to its older neighbors. Its classic “iron-front” façade featured fluted cast iron pilasters, a recessed entry, and floor to ceiling plate glass windows. The tall brick parapet above the windows visually tied the three buildings together. After Buford’s death in 1905, his sons carried on the business until 1926. In the 1950s, owner and preservationist Charles Bovey rehabilitated the building for use as a restaurant. He used historic photographs to return the façade back to its stage-coach era Greek Revival-style.
]]>Carved out of Yellowstone, Carbon, and Sweet Grass Counties in 1913, Stillwater County was one of twenty-six counties established between 1910 and 1920. These new counties grew from a widespread belief in Montana’s continuing growth and prosperity—sustained by the arrival of thousands of homesteaders. The Progressive Era’s commitment to representative, responsive government also argued for smaller counties, placing county seats within easy reach. Stillwater County originally provided services from a rented building on Pike Avenue, in Columbus. In March 1918, commissioners of the flourishing county decided to build a temple to justice. World War I caused them to defer their plans so as not to divert funds and materials from the war effort, but when the war ended, so did the economic boom. Drought and low commodity prices brought hardship to farmers, ranchers, and business owners. Nevertheless, county residents voted to support a $75,000 bond in 1919. Billings architect Warren A. Dedrick designed the Neoclassical style brick courthouse. Two-story Ionic columns flank the main entrance of the imposing building, which is trimmed throughout with “artificial” stone. Budget shortfalls dogged the project after struggling citizens rejected a second bond issue in 1920. When county officials moved into the courthouse in May 1921, much of the interior remained incomplete. However, Stillwater County persevered over the years, slowly finishing construction and landscaping. The courthouse’s Neoclassical details denote permanence and remain a symbol of civic pride and commitment to democratic ideals, with the building serving as the center for local government, law, and justice.
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