Shaw's Best Factory

Shaw's Best Factory, Helena, MT View of alley facade, north elevation looking south. Source: National Register of Historic Places nomination form for Shaw's Best Factory by Ellen Baumler. On file at the Montana State Historic Preservation Office, Helena, MT. Creator: Daniel Sidor, photographer Date: Jan 2021

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.