Sacred Heart

Original Church, school, and rectory at 444-448 East Park Street.
The first floor continued as the school after the 1912 fire.

by Richard I. Gibson

This post was stimulated by a Facebook discussion. The focus here is only on the buildings associated with Sacred Heart, and is based on a careful look at the addresses in the City Directories and the Sanborn maps. Click on images to enlarge

The Sacred Heart parish was organized in 1901. In 1901-03, they met at 460-464 East Park, probably the early address of the building that would become the church at 448 East Park when it was completed in 1903.

original altar (destroyed in fire)

The first mass, Christmas Day 1903, opened the completed church at 448 East Park Street, on the south side of the street almost directly across from the Wright’s Drug Store that is the only surviving building in this section of the block. The building included the school, and the rectory was next door (444 E. Park). In 1907-08, the Sacred Heart Convent was built at 407 East Mercury.

The church and school stood immediately east of the Lizzie Mine yard on Park, a mine that had ceased operations by 1916. The area is part of today's revitalization on the East Side.

After the 1912 fire

A fire on November 17, 1912, severely damaged the church, but the first floor survived and continued to be used as the parochial school until 1969; it was finally torn down about 1974 as the Anaconda Company bought up properties in anticipation of expanding the Berkeley Pit to this part of town (which obviously did not happen).

A new church was built a block west and across the street, at 355 East Park (address also given as 349-363), one lot west of the corner of Covert and Park Streets, a vacant lot today. It opened in 1913 and the last mass was celebrated in that church July 1, 1970. It was demolished in 1974-75.

New church, at 355 East Park

Resources: City Directories, 1901-1975; Sanborn maps, 1900, 1916, 1951; Butte's Croatian-Slovenian Americans, by Ann Simonich. The postcard photo of the first church is public domain, circa 1904-1910; the photo of the second church is courtesy of the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, from the Jim & Helen Edwards Collection, used by permission. Fire photos from Anaconda Standard, Nov. 18-19, 1912. Many thanks to Irene Scheidecker at the Archives for assistance.

Iconography in Butte

Stained Glass window in Butte City Hall, 24 East Broadway.

By Richard I. Gibson

Yesterday on a walking tour, an observant student from Glendive, Montana, asked me about the significance of the Star of David in the stained glass in the 1890 City Hall (24 East Broadway). My answer was that it was not religious, but simply a popular geometric design. But the question spurred this inquiry into some iconic designs in historic Butte buildings.

Our buildings have a vast array of icons, from simple and complex artistic designs to emblems identifying a business, a building, or the year one or the other was established. The hexagram in the City Hall’s central upper window reflects a very long heritage. Most religions, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity have used the symbol, although today it is most closely connected to the Jewish tradition. Heraldry in the Middle Ages employed it. It was even a symbol for the German Brewer’s Guild, and taverns in Nuremburg and elsewhere used it as a mark indicating that they had the legal right to tap beer. Today, some find occult and satanic significance to the hexagram.

Freemasons used the two interlocking triangles of the hexagram as a symbol for “the mingling of apparent opposites in nature, darkness and light, error and truth, ignorance and wisdom, evil and good, throughout human life.” (from Mackey, Encyclopedia of Freemasonry). It is possible that a Masonic connection to the builders of the Butte City Hall led to the hexagram in the stained glass, but the simpler explanation is that it is a simple, symmetrical, ancient, and popular geometric design that worked well with the Romanesque architectural style of the building.

* * *

Tile work on Dodge Brothers building, Park Street at Idaho.

Most Butte folks have probably noticed the swastikas in the tile work at the Dodge Brothers Auto Dealership, built in 1912 at the corner of Park and Idaho Streets. The swastika is another ancient design motif, dating to around 3000 B.C. in the Indus Valley Civilization. Apart from modern usage, it is probably most familiar to us today in Sanskrit traditions, where the symbol means “to be good,” or luck, or auspicious. In Chinese, it means “myriad” or eternity. Early Greek coins used the swastika, and Celtic bronze shields dating to about 300 B.C. are covered with them. Native American civilizations, from the Ohio River Valley to the Navajo and Panama employ swastika designs.

In the 1870s archaeological investigations at Troy, by Heinrich Schliemann, captured peoples’ imaginations, and the presence of swastikas there led to a resurgence of their use as design elements in Europe and America that usually symbolized good luck or success, if they symbolized anything. Schliemann’s work also led to the use of the swastika by German Nazis, ultimately stigmatizing the symbol in much of today’s world.

Because the swastikas at the Dodge Brothers building are combined with many other designs, including rampant lions, flowers, and simple geometric patterns, the likely explanation there is also likely pretty mundane: popular, pretty designs that the tile artist used for decorative effect, and little more.

Background information from Wikipedia and other online sources. Photos by Richard Gibson. 

The Mantle & Bielenberg Block – 3. Creamery Café

By Richard I. Gibson

Previous posts about the M&B block are here and here. 

1979 HABS/HAER photo.

The Creamery Café, commemorated in the prominent ghost sign on the east face of the M&B building (and a less prominent one on the west face), occupied part of the ground floor here from 1913 until 1957. The Café moved to the M&B on Broadway following the devastating fire on North Main, its original location.

Theo McCabe and Roy McClelland both came to Butte in 1903, and in July 1903 partnered to establish a restaurant in the basement at 36 North Main Street. Four years later, the Creamery Cafe subscribed to the Independent Telephone Company’s network (phone no. 5058), and the partners each had home phones as well, at 502 South Washington and 662 Colorado, respectively.

36 N. Main St. circa 1904.

In 1911, the Creamery was at 24 North Main, but it hadn’t moved—the address scheme changed. It was still in the basement of the same building, known as the O’Rourke Estate Building. (The building at Granite and Main, Curley’s store today, is the one we think of as the O’Rourke Estate, but the Estate likely owned many properties around Butte). On July 30, 1912, a fire and explosion at about 4:00 a.m. resulted from a worker rendering lard in the café oven and placing the burning container on the stove, where the flaming grease spattered everywhere spreading the fire very quickly. Although “all the fire equipment in the city” responded, ultimately three buildings were lost.

The fire burned out several businesses, wiping out almost the entire inventory of the McDonald Shoe Company, a $22,000 loss. Residents in Mrs. Josephine Bietz’ rooming house on the upper floors barely escaped with their scant night clothes; several ailing residents had to be carried out as the flames reached their apartment doors. Mrs. Bietz had been burned out when her lodging house was in the Harvard Block on West Park, destroyed in the huge conflagration that wiped out the Symons Stores and more in 1905 (Phoenix Block today). Several pets were killed in the fire, but no humans were injured seriously.

July 30, 1912. D'Acheul building at right,
Creamery Cafe in building at left.

The building south of the O’Rourke Estate/Creamery, 20 N. Main (32 N. Main before 1911) was erected before 1891 and for many years housed D’Acheul’s drug store. (See the vignette in this previous post; compare to the 1912 fire photo here.) At the time of the fire that destroyed it, Ley’s Jewelery was on the ground floor there, and the second level held offices and meeting halls; ironically, the Cooks and Waiters Unions met there. The total value of losses was estimated at more than $70,000 at the time, with about $52,000 covered by insurance. Later estimates pegged the total loss at about $49,000.

The three destroyed buildings were replaced in short order by three more, including two that survive today: the Rookwood Hotel/Speakeasy (and BS Café) at 24-26 N. Main, and the three-story building next door which holds a Ley’s Jewelry ghost sign. All the buildings in the rest of the block adjacent to these buildings, all of which survived the 1912 fire, were lost in conflagrations in 1969 (buildings to the north to Broadway) and 1973 (Medical Arts Center fire south to Park).

Sources: Montana Catholic Newspaper (Butte), January 21, 1905, including interior shot of café; Sanborn Maps (1900, 1916); City Directories (1903-1957); Anaconda Standard (fire image) and Butte Miner for July 31, 1912; ghost sign photo from 1979 HABS/HAER survey, via Library of Congress (public domain).

A grim centennial

Ruins of the Olsen Block at left

Lost Butte book update: Photos sent to publisher; word count at 34,000 – requirement is 34,000-36,000, and I’m not quite done yet – so, it’s looking good. Text deadline May 15.

By Richard I. Gibson


A grim centennial

April 10, 2012 marks the centennial of one of the most expensive fires in Butte’s first 75 years. Someone tossed a cigarette into the hay bin at Campana Feed Company’s warehouse at Iron and Nevada. It quickly erupted into a conflagration that destroyed two entire city blocks and left some 200 people homeless, but while there were some injuries, no one was killed. Nearly half of those driven from their residences lived at the Olsen Block, 741-747 S. Wyoming, where a wall of fire blasted out the windows. The total loss was estimated at $350,000 initially, later revised down to $295,000, but it was still the third most costly fire in Butte above ground before 1946 when old Butte High School burned.

Later in 1912 the fourth worst fire loss in pre-1946 Butte struck on September 1 when the original Thomas Block burned in the middle of the first block of West Park Street. Multiple businesses were burned out with a loss totaling almost $221,000 in dollars of the day. The present building, designed by Butte architect Herman Kemna, replaced the old Thomas Block in 1913.

Other big 1912 fires included the destruction of the Grand Opera House where the Leggat Hotel now stands (May 25, a $24,500 loss), Henningsen Produce (January 11, $21,000), Creamery Café (July 30, $49,000), H&B Block (Oct. 18, $49,000), and Sacred Heart Church (Nov. 17, $26,000).

The greatest fire losses in early Butte were the 1889 fire in the first block of West Granite ($512,000) and the 1905 Symons fire on West Park where the 1906 Phoenix Block stands today ($698,000).

The news of the Campana fire was overshadowed in Butte and around the world by the Titanic disaster five days later.