Chastine Humphrey

These cabins and the tree were on the first block of West Quartz Street, where the old fire station (Butte Archives) stands today. The main cabin and tree were just west of the fire station, in today's parking lot. All these buildings are gone today. All but the left-most of the row of three cabins were gone by 1901. 

By Richard I. Gibson

The first boy born in Butte, Chastine Humphrey, was born April 16, 1868, in a three-room log cabin beneath the shade of a fir tree – the only tree in the townsite of Butte. The cabin stood on West Quartz Street at the later site of the Maryland Boarding House, which was located at 21 West Quartz, the parking lot immediately west of the Fire Station, today’s Archives building.

Chastine Humphrey, Sr., the boy’s father, laid out the townsite of Butte in 1866. The senior Humphrey’s bother, Oliver, passed through the Butte area in the early 1860s but ultimately settled in Helena. He wrote to his brother encouraging him to come to Montana, and in late 1864, Chastine, his wife and daughter (later Mrs. Nell O’Donnell of Walkerville) arrived in Butte. Mrs. Humphrey was reportedly the first woman in Butte.

Of the cluster of cabins Humphrey built, only one was still standing in 1901, just east of the then new fire station. That log cabin served as a barn and stable for Gilmore & Salisbury’s stage coach horses. Further east, another small cabin had been built by Ben Kingsbury. The 3-story Kingsbury Block was built about 1887 on the northwest corner of Quartz and Main, where it stood until it was demolished in the Model Cities program in 1969-70. Furthest east, probably the cabin in the lower left corner in the image above, William Matthews and Bryan Irvine shared the space. Matthews committed suicide by jumping from a window at the Insane Asylum at Warm Springs. Irvine was still in Butte 30 years after the date of the image above (circa 1868), living at 643 West Granite Street in 1895.

Other residents in the 1860s in this block included A.W. Barnard, on the south side of the street. The story went that when W.A. Clark first came to Butte, he spent his first night here in Barnard’s cabin. Barnard, like Kingsbury, became quite wealthy, and built the Barnard Block on the site of his original cabin.

The tree that sheltered the Humphrey house, the last one in the area, finally “yielded to the axe and fell like the gallant soldier on the field of battle, after all hope had gone.” The Humphreys burned the wood in their fireplace and kitchen stove.

Chas Humphrey, the son, took a job with the Butte Miner newspaper in 1879, at age 12. He eventually became a member of the International Typographical Union, working until automated machines – Mergenthalers – replaced him in 1895. He continued in the printing profession including typesetting for the Jefferson County Zephyr, in Whitehall.

Chastine Humphrey, Jr. died of pneumonia January 12, 1901, only 32 years old. The Humphreys are buried in Mount Moriah Cemetery.

On the occasion of Chas’s death, his sister Nell O’Donnell recounted the locations of the Humphrey cabins on West Quartz.

“Our house stood where the Maryland House now stands [i.e., the lot immediately west of the Archives building today]. It has been said that it stood upon the site of the new fire station. It is true a house belonging to father stood on the fire station site, but we did not live in it. The old tree stood on the slope almost where the kitchen of the Maryland house stands. [i.e., near the alley, just west of the northwest corner of the Archives building].”

The photo below is from 1875 and shows the Humphrey cabin and the tree at far right. Beneath it is the same photo, annotated to show buildings and Main Street.

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Primary resource: Anaconda Standard, January 27, 1901. Also Sanborn maps and city directories. See also this post about the first house in Butte, on East Quartz St.  See also The Story of Butte, special issue of The Butte Bystander for April 15, 1897. Images of Butte in 1875 from A Brief History of Butte, Montana: the World's Greatest Mining Camp, by Harry C. Freeman, 1900, digitized by Butte Public Library, annotations by Gibson.

What Was There? Quartz and Main

Annotated to provide references for the text

By Richard I. Gibson

The southwest corner of Quartz and Main Streets in 1884 was a half-block west of the first house in Butte, and a half-block south of the new Miners Union Hall that was under construction. The buildings facing Main, south from Quartz, had a wholesale liquor store, druggist, and jeweler in a 1-story building under one roof made of tin. Just south of that was Butte’s Post Office, with club rooms on the second floor. Next door to it was a dry goods store with the Odd Fellows hall above.

In 1885, the 1-story building on the corner either was torn down and a new 2-story building built, or the original had added a second floor. The footprint is almost identical to the 1884 plan, so I suspect a second floor was added as was a common practice in booming Butte.

Either way, the façade on the corner building (called the Leyson Building after 1885, for J.H. Leyson, the jeweler in one of the storefronts) was combined with the next building to the south, the former Post Office. The ground floor held Jimmy Lynch’s saloon at the corner (“one of Butte’s most famous”), the druggist, and Leyson & Truck jewelers in the northern block.

The adjacent building held J.E. Rickard’s Paint Company on the ground floor (you can see the sign for “Paints” in the 1890 photo above). It later became Charles Schatzlein Paint Co. Among more conventional paints, Schatzlein was also the supplier of paints and oils to artist Charlie Russell in the 1890s, and he also sold Russell paintings. Nancy Russell wrote for Charlie in 1902 that “Mr. Schaztlein has done more to raise the prices of my pictures than any friend I have.”

John Rickards

John Rickards, born in Delaware in 1848, came to Butte in 1882. He was elected the first lieutenant governor and second governor of Montana, serving as the governor from 1893-1897.

The second floor above Rickard’s Paint Store, which was interconnected with the building to the north, held the Silver Bow Club’s rooms. The third building to the south was also connected to those to the north in terms of its façade, as you can see in the photo. That third store was Goldsmith’s men’s clothing (later Siegel Clothing), and the IOOF still met in the room above.

In the right side of the photo, on Quartz Street, the turrets mark the Beresford Building, built in 1891 (so the photo caption above is in error by at least a year). It was built primarily as a 3-story lodging, but there were two stores on the Quartz Street level, including C.E. Miller’s Glass Store. The lodging was commonly known as Mrs. Armstrong’s Boarding House for the manager. The Beresford had its own boiler. The boiler for the corner building was beneath the Quartz Street sidewalk in the sidewalk vault.

In the lower left part of the photo you can see tracks. They are not the tracks for the electric trolleys that operated all over Butte until 1937, but are part of the cable line that served Butte from about 1888 into the early 1890s, when the electric trolleys replaced it. The cable line here, on Main, ran from Galena and Main up Main Street until it reached the Lexington Mine. It went up an alley west of the Lexington to Daly Street in Walkerville. The streets are unpaved in this photo.

This photo was published in the Montana Standard April 3, 1960. It was owned by Robert Logan, internationally known singer and janitor at the Miners Bank until his death in 1945. 


All these buildings are gone today, represented by the small modern shop on the southwest corner of Quartz and Main, together with its parking lot and the parking lots behind the NorthWestern Energy building and the Montana Standard. The corner building was demolished before 1951, and the rest were torn down after 1960.

* * *

Building photo published in Montana Standard, April 3, 1960.

Leyson ad from Souvenir history of the Butte Fire Department by Peter Sanger, Chief Engineer (1901), scanned by Butte-Silver Bow Public Library.

Additional resources: Sanborn maps, 1884, 1888, 1890, 1891, 1900, 1916, 1951; City Directories. 

Corner by Corner: Quartz and Crystal

By Richard I. Gibson

Today's post is the first in a series of podcasts exploring Butte corner by corner. Ideally, you'd be standing at the corner as you listen to the audio, but I hope armchair travelers enjoy it as well. Some pages that may be useful in connection with the podcast are linked below:

The Silver King Lode
Architect Charles Prentice
301 N. Crystal
Frank Paneek Panisko
212 N. Crystal

Listen to the 3-minute podcast:

The first house in Butte

By Richard I. Gibson

It’s fairly common knowledge that the first home built in Butte was located on what is now East Quartz Street. For me, at least, that was all I knew.

But the special edition of The Butte Bystander newspaper for April 15, 1897, recounts stories of “old timers” and Butte history that is lost, including the sketch above of that first house.

Prospectors the Porter brothers, Dennis Leary and George W. Newkirk built the house and outbuildings in 1866. Their living quarters was the taller building at left, beyond the corral. Behind the house (to the right) stood their blacksmith shop; next to the right was a horse stable. They kept milk cows in the shed at right front. The view here looks west, so Quartz Street would be along the left side of the image.

The men established the Parrot claims with Joseph Ramsdell and built a small smelter (likely Butte’s first) on the lower reaches of Town Gulch (Dublin Gulch) not far from this house. They could not make the fire hot enough to get molten metal to flow, so the smelter failed. They tried again on Parrot Gulch, right below the mine, employing a windmill fan to create a draft in a crude blast furnace, using an 8-horsepower threshing machine as the driving source for the fan. That one failed as well. The Parrot and Ramsdell Parrot Mines would go on to become important excavations, both more than 1,000 feet deep, and other smelters would succeed.

The partners sold the buildings above in 1869, to become the core of the Girton House, an early hotel. This makes it easy to determine the precise location for this first house in Butte: East Quartz, between Main and Wyoming, on the north side of the street, just east of the alley that runs north to Copper Street. A parking lot today.

In 1884, the Girton House (#17 in Bird's-Eye view at left, and including the two-story building above the word "Quartz") was just west of one of the early Miner’s Union Halls, which stood on the northwest corner of Quartz and Wyoming.

The building survived in 1891, as the Cotter House, successor to the Girton, but by 1897 the space was covered by waste rock from the Gold Hill mine, whose shaft stood just to the north, below the intersection of Pennsylvania and Copper Streets. There has not been a building on this spot since before 1897.

Sources: Butte Bystander, April 15, 1897, The Story of Butte; Sanborn maps.

The Silver King Lode

Cherokee Park at upper right

Click any image to enlarge

By Richard I. Gibson

I’ve known that my 1898 house is set into mine waste since nearly the day I moved in, when I saw mica and pyrite on the basement floor. It was sloughing off the exposed wall beneath the stairs, where angular pyrite-bearing granite chunks and loose fine material were clearly visible. It wasn’t long before I learned that Uptown Butte’s parks mark old mine sites, but it was a good while before I discovered Sanborn maps and found that the park just north of my house, Cherokee Park (locals call it Cheese Park, but that’s another story), is the site of the Silver King Mine.

The black layer is probably decomposed wood

Last week, a hole opened up in the street maybe 40 feet from the northwest corner of my garage. It was only about a foot across, but the open drop into it was close to six feet deep. After numerous people came to look into it and paint variously colored marks on the pavement, on Tuesday a Butte-Silver Bow Public Works Department crew arrived to excavate the hole.

Soon the one-foot hole was 15 feet long and nearly as deep. Environmental Manager Tom Malloy pointed out the layers of fill – possibly some asphalt in the shallower zones, but mostly obvious mine waste like that in my basement, plus mixed coarse soil and rocks. We speculated that one black zone in the excavation wall, maybe three feet down, was coal or slag or charcoal. Eventually the excavator revealed a small hole at the bottom, presumably the sump taking water through the material, ultimately allowing for the collapse that made the original hole in the pavement up top.

Probably bedrock at left and
below debris (with brick) at right

Tom organized a water test; 1,000 gallons of water just went down, down, down. As he played water off the sides, I’m convinced he revealed at least three sides of an older hole made of solid (relatively solid) granite. Tom and I both think they were down to some original man-made cutting associated with the mine.

Close to my house!

The Silver King Claim extends from about the north side of Quartz Street to Copper in the west, and to the alley between Quartz and Copper in the east (it narrows eastward). On the west its boundary is about half way between Crystal and Clark, and on the east its limit lies between Idaho and Montana. My house on Crystal, north of the jog in Quartz, sits on the intersection of the Silver King, Plymouth, and Morning Sun claims. That jog in Quartz Street and the angling front yards of homes in the 600 block reflect the northern boundary of the Plymouth claim.

My lot is the red square

There were two Silver King mines and hoist works. Based on the Sanborns—and given the gaps in the years, it’s challenging to be certain, so I’m inferring from other evidence, such as the mine waste in my 1898 basement—I think the western shafts (where Cherokee Park is today) were in operation from about 1895 until about 1908. They were “not in operation Jan. 1910” on the 1914 map. The eastern mine was located at 210 West Quartz, between two houses (one still standing, at 208), directly north across the alley from the Copper King Mansion. That operation began after 1900 and worked until about 1915 (apparently working in 1914, but idle in 1916). There are tantalizing pasted-on updates in the physical 1914 Sanborn map (at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives) that suggest another hoist beneath the vacant lot at 521-527 West Quartz (a shaft was definitely there) – you can almost see through the pasted-on layers to older structures. I think the 1914 Sanborn is an update of a 1907 map set, but I’m not certain.

Red dots: modern road alongside Cherokee Park.
Blue oval: the excavation. 1914 Sanborn map.

At Cherokee Park north of my house, the operation had a main shaft in the southwestern part of what is now the park in 1900, with two boilers for generating steam and a 25-foot iron chimney. There was a secondary gallows frame and shaft, due north of my house about the width of my house away, along the south edge of the park or even under the street there today. The secondary headframe was connected to the main mine operation by two tramways, one to the northwest (about where the present-day street sits) to the western dump, and another to the north to dumps near the northern edge of the park along Copper Street. I think the relatively steep berm west of Cherokee Park is basically the Silver King mine dump.

House alignment on W. Quartz reflects
edge of Plymouth Claim

The mine complex was going strong in 1905 when Walter Harvey Weed, author of the 1912 US Geological Survey Professional Paper on Butte, visited. He apparently saw the 250-foot level, where he examined the Silver King vein, “remarkable for its richness and for the amount of gold which it carries.” He reported ore as high as 333 ounces of silver per ton and $294 in gold, also remarkable in that the metals were highly disseminated in what looked like ordinary decomposed granite, rather than concentrated in the quartz vein. Weed also noted a subsidiary vein branching to the west, a “very zincky vein.” (Note that the Anselmo, not far west of here, produced a lot of zinc.) Weed reported that “the yield of the Silver King vein has been rather phenomenal; and there was probably something like $150,000 in ore in sight at the time of visit (1905).”

Coppery shows in a rock from the dig

The vein dips to the south according to Weed, which may explain why the eastern Silver King mine shaft, at 210 West Quartz, was located off the claim itself. The hoist building there was in the lot near Quartz Street, but the gallows frame was nearer the alley between it and the Mansion. The dumps surrounded the headframe there.

Assuming that the Sanborn map is correct, the Cherokee Park Silver King mine operation ended at least 102 years ago, before 1910. The material in the excavation hole included a few bricks along with big loose rocks, all about 10 feet down; the suggestion is strong that there was a lot of filling going on even that long ago. I have not figured out when the curving extension of Crystal Street, along the southwestern edge of Cherokee Park, was installed. It does not show on the 1951 Sanborn map, while the house on the end of Crystal (in the middle of the street; address 535, and gone today) is still there together with the secondary headframe north of my house (301), so this area might have still been mine dumps as late as the 1950s.

LOTS of cement!

After pouring water into the hole, showing that it simply flowed on underground somewhere, the county crew plugged that deep hole with about 10 cubic yards of concrete, then filled in the rest of the excavation. Short of new pavement on the surface, it was good as new within hours, but what it hides below led me to this enjoyable investigation. If these electrons survive, maybe the next time someone has to excavate there (5? 25? 50? years from now?) they’ll have some sense of what to expect.

Funding for the B-SB Shaft Failure and Subsidence Mitigation Program is courtesy of the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC), Conservation and Resource Development Division, Resource Development Bureau, RIT Grant. Anywhere on the Butte Hill, if you see a suspicious hole in the ground, or even a curious depression, or an intriguing ground slump, the very first thing you should do, is to take three steps backward. Then call for assistance. BSB Planning Dept., Tom Malloy, 497-6257 or 490-4286.

Julian Eltinge returns to Butte

Photo from Anaconda Standard, Dec. 14, 1913. Click to enlarge.

By Richard I. Gibson

Most of my readers will be familiar with the story of  Julian Eltinge (1881-1941), perhaps the greatest female impersonator of the 20th Century. Born William Julian Dalton, he arrived in Butte as a child with his father, a mining engineer, and ultimately took the name of his Butte friend, the son of W.A. Clark clerk Charles Eltinge, who was the first owner of the house at 211 West Quartz.

The impetus for this post is my encounter with a photo of Eltinge on his visit to Butte in 1913 when he was at the peak of his fame, seven years after his command performance for King Edward VII in London. He was in Butte touring with his own production, The Fascinating Widow. The one-night performance, December 15, 1913, was at the Broadway Theater (later the Montana Theater, at Broadway and Montana Streets, today replaced by the telephone company building). Seats ran 50¢ to $2.00—rather a pretty penny even for a live show in those days, when short films cost from 10¢ to 35¢ for admission. 

Films competing in Butte with Eltinge’s production that December included The Wreck and The Thrifty Janitor at the Ansonia, and The Cavemen’s War: A love tale of the prehistoric days when might was right, at the Orpheum. Live Vaudeville at the Empress included Big Jim the Dancing Bear, Burke & Harrison’s comedy act, virtuoso Luigi Dell’Oro, and more—all for a ticket costing less than 35¢.

New Year's Eve, 1897

By Richard I. Gibson

The society corner in Victorian Butte newspapers recorded all and sundry events, including New Year’s Eve parties. The item here, from the Butte Bystander for January 8, 1898, reports such a gathering at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Erastus Thomas, 213 East Quartz (not West Quartz; the article is in error). East Quartz is one of the oldest parts of Butte, with the first cabin allegedly built there in the 1860s. By 1900, there were 58 dwellings in the block bounded by Granite, Quartz, Arizona, and Ohio Streets. Four were three-story boarding houses and six were two-story homes, four-plexes, and apartments, while the rest were single-story homes, but many of the latter had additional buildings that were likely inhabited. It’s reasonable to estimate that the population of this block exceeded 200 in 1900. Today, there are two houses in this area.

The narrow single-story Thomas home must have been crowded with 27 party-goers at a sit-down dinner. The house was built between 1888 and 1891 as part of the Thornton Addition, so it was fairly new in 1897. The location was convenient, just two blocks north of the site of the Washington School, two blocks east of the Butte Brewery, and immediately below the Parrot Mine complex where Erastus worked as an engineer.

The 1897 New Year’s Eve party list reveals the cosmopolitan nature of Butte. We can determine that the attendees came from all over Butte, and from all walks of life. Mrs. Ellof Peterson managed a boarding house at 10 E. Gagnon Street; Martin Brecke was a miner who lived at 725 N. Montana. Michael Geiger, who attended with his wife and daughter, lived at 1109 W. Woolman where he ran the Home Industry Publishing Company. The Bjorglums were probably Mr. and Mrs. Martin Bjorgum. He was a tailor with a shop at the northeast corner of Main and Mullins in Centerville; he and his family lived at #6 O’Neill Street in Walkerville. Another tailor, George Erickson, worked for Henry Jonas at 11 E. Granite Street, but lived at 503 S. Montana.

Mary Hoban, widow of John, boarded at 107½ West Quartz (The Sherman, which stood immediately west of the O’Rourke Building, in part of today’s jail/BSB parking lot). Another widow, Mrs. Albertine Minger, establishes a connection to the East Side: she lived at the boarding house at the northeast corner of East Galena and Shields Avenue, just below the looming Pennsylvania Mine headframe at the southern margin of the Butte Hill. The two-story building there also was home to party attendees David Trotter (a machinist), and Louis Demars, who both lived there and operated a grocery store at the same location. Demars also ran a confectionery at 323 S. Main (across from where Naranche Stadium is today). Today, the old corner of Galena and Shields is under the waste rock on the rim of the Berkeley Pit just a bit northwest of the viewing stand; Shields has been significantly relocated.

The party list gives a cross-section of Butte’s middle class, from tailors and grocers to engineers, publishers, machinists and miners, boarding-house mistresses and widows living (apparently) independently.

The Butte Bystander was a short-lived labor-oriented newspaper published from 1890-1898 (as the Butte Bystander, 1890-97, and just The Bystander in 1897-98).

A copper letter

This 1930s letter promoting Butte was given to Robert Renouard in Seattle, because of his close connection to Butte: Robert’s ancestor Edward I. Renouard became vice president of the Anaconda Company and lived in the Superintendent’s Home at the Mountain Con. The return address is A.H. Heilbronner Co., “originators of copper novelties,” 212-214 N. Main, Butte, and it was sent to Miss Donna Jean Varner of Minneapolis. The souvenir was mailed in October 1936 with 3 cents postage (normal first class rate a the time, but inflation-adjusted equivalent to 48.3 cents) and it was 3 cents postage due.

In the letter, note that Butte was “Nearly a mile deep,” and the misuse of “your” for “you’re” apparently isn’t quite the recent development that it sometimes seems.

Heilbronner’s 1-story store on N. Main is gone today; it stood where the Wells Fargo Bank’s drive-through is located, three doors south of the ACM pay office which still stands at the corner of Main and Quartz. There were two narrow stores in one more building between Heilbronner’s and the massive, ornate Beaver Block (Marchesseau and Valiton) that stood on the Granite Street corner where the bank is today. Adolph Heilbronner lived at 901 W. Quartz, in a small miner’s cottage that still occpies the northwest corner of Quartz and Excelsior. I suppose that Mr. Heilbronner walked past my house (at Quartz and Crystal) on his way to work.

Images courtesy Robert Renouard (click to enlarge)