Butte’s giant copper industry brought workers crowding into every available space. Residential building lots were at a premium and yards nearly nonexistent at the end of the nineteenth century. This Queen Anne style cottage, built circa 1897, illustrates the need to construct houses close together to achieve maximum living space. The residence was likely built as an investment. Its first tenants were mining engineer Josiah Trerise, his wife Annie, and her mother and brother. By 1904, owner John L. Hurzeler, his wife Elizabeth, and daughter Gladys were in residence. A blacksmith by trade, Hurzeler was a founder and partner in the Butte Carriage Works’s largest carriage manufacturer. The longtime business weathered the transition from horses to cars by switching to automobile repairs in the 1920s. When Hurzeler died in 1940, Elizabeth kept the family home for another decade. A small “eyebrow” dormer rising out of the hipped roof, a front gable embellished with patterned shingles, and a decorative iron fence capping the retaining wall lend the home its distinctive personality.
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