Robert C. Logan

Today’s post is part of African-American History Month.

By Richard I. Gibson

Robert Logan traveled the world, spent most of his life in Butte, and started out a slave.

He never knew his parents. At age one, in 1859, he was sold into slavery in Lexington, Kentucky for $150. His master, Edward W. Powell, raised race horses, and Robert rode as a jockey as well as performing other duties for Powell and other horsemen. When Logan was 17 he fled Kentucky and for the next dozen years survived one way or another. In 1890, he arrived in Butte. According to the 1890 census, there were 1,490 African-Americans living in Montana then.

Logan took one of the only semi-professional jobs available to a Black man in 1890, as a porter on the Butte-to-Salt Lake run of the Union Pacific Railroad. During layovers in Salt Lake City, he took voice lessons from Evan Stevens, the Director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and other voice instructors in Salt Lake City. They helped him make his deep voice into a world-renowned instrument.

Logan sang in 1896 before 30,000 people at the Welsh International Eisteddfod musical competition in Denver and was the only non-white finalist. The winner “was a foregone conclusion,” a Welshman, but Robert Logan came in second. This launched his career as a singer.

In 1899 he joined a Black minstrel group, the Georgia Minstrels, that performed in 40 states, 10 Canadian provinces, Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand. His deep bass voice became famous. “His range covers more than two full octaves with his lower notes resembling the distant vibration of thunder,” according to a New South Wales newspaper review in 1899. And in Hawaii, he reportedly portrayed Simon Legree in Uncle Tom's Cabin so well that the "audience was ready to do him bodily harm."

The troupe included Butte on its itinerary, and when in Butte they often performed at parties hosted by William Andrews Clark, Jr., presumably at Will’s home on Galena Street. W.A. Clark., Jr. was the founder of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in 1919.

Logan tired of the traveling performer’s life and returned to Butte permanently in 1905. He took a job as janitor for the Miner’s Savings Bank and Trust on West Park Street when they opened their doors in 1907, and held the job until he retired in 1935. He continued to sing with the Bethel Baptist Church choir – he and his wife Elizabeth lived at 112 S. Idaho Street, just two doors north of the African-American Bethel Baptist Church at the corner of Idaho and Mercury. Robert and Elizabeth organized the choir, and Elizabeth was the accompanist until her death in 1935. The sites of the church and the Logan home are occupied by the Fire Station today.

He continued to sing for special events, including the 1921 funeral of General Charles S. Warren at Mountain View Methodist Church. Warren was the first Chief of Police in Butte, a co-founder of the Inter Mountain Publishing Company, and a charter member and first president of the Silver Bow Club. Warren Island, in Lake Pend Oreille, is named for him. Warren lived at 211 S. Washington, so was a near neighbor to Robert and Elizabeth Logan.

Even at age 83 Logan was a soloist and singer with the Butte Male Chorus. He died in 1945, remembered as one of the greatest bass singers of his day. Robert and Elizabeth Logan are buried in Butte's Mt. Moriah Cemetery.

Resources: primary biography – Montana Standard, March 1, 1942; Montana Standard, March 3, 1945; The Crisis, W.E.B. duBois, ed., 1921; Montana, Its Story and Biography, edited by Tom Stout, American Historical Society, 1921. Thanks to Cheryl Ackerman for finding the 1942 news article.

Western Lumber Company

By Richard I. Gibson

Even after the brick ordinance went into effect mandating fire-resistant construction in Butte, the demand for lumber was still huge. Many brick buildings were still framed in wood, and most residences in the booming city were wood, or brick-veneered wood.

W.A. Clark

The Western Lumber Company was “one of the oldest and most successful” lumber companies in the city. W.A. Clark, ever with an eye to profit (and probably other motives), created the company in 1898 and was President of Western Lumber in 1905. Other officers were A.H. Wethey, Vice President; W.M. Bickford, Secretary; Harry W. McLaughlin, Treasurer; and W.W. Dunks, local manager. Like Clark, Wethey got around in business, and he was also Secretary of Clark’s Colusa-Parrot Mining & Smelting Co. with an office at 10 West Broadway and a home on the prestigious west side, at 834 West Granite. McLaughlin was a Missoula legislator whose support Clark was reportedly trying to buy—1898 was precisely when Clark was beginning his aggressive efforts to attain the U.S. Senate seat.

Walter Bickford’s law office was in the Silver Bow Block (the old one, where the parking lot is today across from the Montana Standard) and he lived in a bay-fronted five-plex at 223 North Washington Street which is gone today. William Dunks, who lived at 817 Colorado and was a bookkeeper in 1900, succeeded O.J. McConnell as local manager about 1903. Dunks continued as the local manager at least until 1928, when the Anaconda Company acquired Western Lumber from W.A. Clark’s heirs. In 1931-32, Anaconda shut the operation down.

Western Lumber together with Clark’s real estate company, Clark-Montana, were ultimately responsible for the dam on the Clark Fork and the company town that became Milltown. They operated a small railroad in the Bonner area, with 10 miles of track, from 1912-1928. The company had sawmills across western Montana, with a planing mill at Lothrop (or Lathrop), near today’s Alberton northwest of Missoula, but most of the lumber came to Butte.

Milltown dam (1908 flood)

The Western Lumber complex occupied the block bounded by Main, Porphyry, Wyoming, and Gold Streets, where Butte High School stands today. By 1916, that block included an auto repair shop on the corner of Porphyry and Wyoming, pretty much where the main entry to the school is today. There were also blacksmiths and a paint shop in the block, together with a row of at least nine alley houses on the alley that’s now between the Tripp & Dragstedt Apartments and the school.

Western Lumber acquired the Montana Lumber & Manufacturing Co., which occupied the same Main St. location in 1900, but the buildings were “vacant and not used” at that time. Western rejuvenated and expanded the Butte operation. This part of town was a sort of “lumber central” for many years. In 1888, the Silver City Lumber Company spread across a couple blocks around Gold to Platinum and Colorado to Dakota (at a time when Gold Street didn’t go through) and there was a small planning mill, the Phoenix, on Porphyry east of Main, where the Montana Lumber and Western Lumber Companies would expand.

Butte High was built in 1936-38 on the land vacated by the 1931-32 demise of the Western Lumber Company, owned at that time by the Anaconda Company.

You could probably write a book about the Western Lumber Company — so look at this post as just a tantalizing introduction.

Resources: Montana Catholic, Jan. 21, 1905; Two Rivers History; City Directories; Sanborn Maps; photo of Milltown Dam during 1908 flood via Butte CTEC.

The perils of mistakes

Or: Don’t believe everything you read in historic annals

By Richard I. Gibson

I make mistakes, of course, even though I try very hard to avoid them. My topic today is not my own shortcomings, but mistakes found in historical records.

I figured out one before, a newspaper reference to 213 West Quartz when it was really East Quartz. Lately I have been researching the building at 121-127 West Broadway (adult book store) for new owners Chuck and Lyza Schnabel (Quarry Brewing, across the street at 124 W. Broadway). It has direct connections to the Clark family and to the Butte Miner newspaper, but the story is complicated considerably by what I have concluded to be errors in both the city directories and in the 1914 Sanborn map.

The 1928 city directory says the Butte Miner was at 125 West Broadway. That’s true; the Butte Miner masthead gives that address from 1902-1928. But the directory also says 125 West Broadway includes the following offices: Room 301, Elm Orlu Mining Co. and Timber Butte Mining Co.; room 306, Elm Orlu labor dept.; room 402, Clark Law Library and three lawyers’ offices; room 503, Moulton Mining, Clark-Montana Realty, and Northern Development Co., and three other rooms, later including the Butte Electric (Street) Railway Company. William A. Clark, Jr., was listed as president of several of these companies.

Knowing that in the late 1920’s Clark Senior’s estate was being liquidated (he died in 1925), at first I thought the surviving companies all had their offices at 125 West Broadway, the building I was researching. But thinking twice it became obvious that there was no way all those offices could possibly exist in that small space. It turns out, the directories had somehow confused this building, which was essentially the business office of the Butte Miner, with the Miner Building down the street at 69-71 West Broadway (sometimes 73-75, depending on changing address schemes). The latter was a five-story building, so room numbers like 501 make sense. It stood west of the Kenwood Building, in the eastern portion of the parking structure there today.

In trying to determine the origin of the building at 121-127 West Broadway, the Sanborn maps give a great clue: the 1916 map shows the building as it is today, with the note “from plans, Feb 1916.” From this I conclude it was erected in 1916. The mystery lies in its earlier story, because as mentioned above, the Butte Miner was there (according to their masthead) from 1902 onwards. The physical 1914 Sanborn map at the Archives shows only a small dwelling/store at that location, the same as on the 1900 Sanborn. The 1914 map is one that has been much updated with pasted-on materials, and I’m pretty sure this represents a failure to update completely. I believe the 1900 map is the underpinning of the 1914 map, and that the Butte Miner built its new building there in 1901-02, and replaced it with the 1916 building that still stands today as the adult book store, soon to be renovated by Chuck into three storefronts as it was in 1916.

The research to conclude all this took close to four hours. There are other approaches to take to try to nail it down for sure, but this is the likely, albeit interpretive, story at this point. The role of 125 West Broadway in William Clark Jr.’s end game with the Clark estate, and the takeover of the Miner by the Anaconda Standard is significant, and remains to be fully documented. The place will be on this year’s Butte CPR Dust to Dazzle tour – the upstairs apartments are amazing.

West Broadway 1884

from the 1884 Bird’s-Eye View via Library of Congress

By Richard I. Gibson

The south side of the first block of West Broadway includes some old buildings – but only one survives from 1884. The IOGT (Independent Order of Good Templars, an anti-alcohol fraternal organization that admitted women) Hall is the two-story building at right in the illustration here, and it’s the only remnant from that time still standing today. The third floor was added in 1891. Two doors down (off the right edge of the picture), the IOOF (Odd Fellows) hall had its foundation laid by September 1884, and it’s another long-term survivor in this block.

The IOGT hall included a stage in the basement and a dwelling on the first floor. It and the restaurant-saloon in mid-block and the prestigious bank at the corner of Main all had slate roofs, while all the others seen here had wooden shingles. Most of these buildings were “cloth lined,” meaning that their frame walls were insulated only by a lining of canvas. Hart & Lavelle’s livery stable had a basement with stone walls on two sides, and the bank had a stone basement.

The Donnell, Clark & Larabie bank occupied the first floor at the corner of Broadway and Main (where D.A. Davidson is today), with offices above and a barber and bathhouse in the basement where they had their own large boiler. The cornice was metal, probably tin. This building lasted until 1916, and its 1916 replacement was in turn replaced in the 1960s by the building there today.

Robert Donnell was expanding his Deer Lodge bank in 1877, with a new branch in Butte, where the 25x100 lot at the corner of Broadway and Main cost $1,400 on April 18, 1877. Donnell’s clerks, W.A. Clark and S.E. Larabie, took charge of the Butte branch and became the owners when another Donnell venture failed, in New York in 1884. Clark’s fortune began in this bank when he took some mine property, including the Travona, in lieu of loan payments, and an uninterested Larabie took a band of horses in exchange for his half interest in the mines.

Photo by Robert Edwards

Recent (January 2012) construction work from the parking lot at Quartz and Alaska, to Broadway (in front of the IOGT Hall), Park, and Galena streets focuses on a pre-1884 underground water-sewer line similar to the picture here by Robert Edwards. Before mining and building altered the landscape, that line was a flowing stream that came down the hill from the Centerville area, about where Alaska Street is today. South of Granite to Galena, most of that stream had been converted to an underground culvert by Summer 1884, but it was still a ditch or open sewer below Galena Street. North of Granite was a slightly different story—fodder for a later post.

Christmas in Butte, 1911 – #7

by Richard I. Gibson

Newspaper delivery people have long been independent entrepreneurs, and Butte’s newsies were no exception. For Dec. 24, 1911, the Butte Miner gave its Christmas Eve edition to the “little fellows” at no charge as a Christmas bonus. Each delivery boy probably made 5¢ on each paper sold that day, instead of his usual 2½¢. That was a fairly big deal in an era when 50¢ bought a nice meal at a boarding house.

Skates and other sporting equipment were hot items for Christmas 1911. The Montana Hardware Company’s sporting goods department offered men’s skates at prices from 75¢ a pair to $5.00 for “American club hockey, hardened full nickel” skates. You could get a baseball for 5¢. Montana Hardware, initially run by W.A. Clark’s brother J. Ross, was at 30-40 West Park in 1911, the 3-story Pennsylvania Building that stood just west of where the F&W Grand Building is today (the Military Recruiting Building, which dates to the 1930s).