Fair Drug & Assayers Supplies

By Richard I. Gibson

Scott Robert Fair was born November 26, 1857, in St. John, New Brunswick, to parents who were natives of Ireland. Fairville, today a neighborhood in St. John, was named for his father, the first resident there. Scott Robert began to study pharmacy in Boston when in his late teens. After working in Boston and New York, he came to Montana about 1889.


By 1893 he had established (with assayer Olof Bergstron) a drug store and assay supply outlet at 137 East Park, on the northwest corner with Arizona Street. He at least dabbled in mining, establishing the Mayflower Mine south of Whitehall—which by about 1896 he had sold to W.A. Clark for a reported $150,000. The Mayflower went on to produce more than 225,000 ounces of gold and 875,000 ounces of silver for Clark and later the Anaconda Company, a total value of around $3 million by 1961, most of it in 1896-1901. New owners in the 2000s have been testing and drilling to evaluate re-opening the Mayflower.  

Invoice, dated Dec. 30, 1900,
to The Butte General Electric Co.,
purchased 45¢ worth of tubing
and paid the bill 1/17/1901

Fair was closely connected with W.A. Clark. In addition to the sale of the mine, his partner Bergstron was the assayer for the Colorado Smelting & Mining Company, of which Clark was vice-president. In February 1900, Fair was summoned to Washington. D.C., to testify in the Senate hearings related to Clark’s alleged bribery of the Montana legislature to “buy” that Senate seat. Fair was asked directly whether he told Montana legislator Thomas Normoyle that $10,000 was his if Normoyle would vote for Clark. Fair denied that, and other suggestions, strenuously—but Normoyle insisted that he had in fact made such an offer, in Fair’s establishment at 115 East Park Street. The upshot of the hearing was the Senate’s refusal to seat Clark; he resigned from the position before he could be ousted, then famously got his friend the Lieutenant Governor of Montana, in the absence of the Governor, to appoint him to that now-vacant seat. That ploy failed as well, but Clark was finally elected and seated in the U.S. Senate in 1901.

1901 advertisement

When he began the drug store at 137 E. Park, Fair lived at 408 West Quartz (a house that I can see out my window as I type this) with his brother George F., who dealt in real estate. By 1896, he and his wife Caroline were living at 606 West Park, and in 1897-98, they relocated to a new home at 221 N. Excelsior which would stay in the family at least until 1963. About the same time, they occupied the new building at 115 East Park that would house the drug and assay company for two decades.

Among the products available at Fair’s Drug was a special “pneumonia mixture,” touted as a cure and sold to treat miners’ consumption (silicosis).

The Fairs participated in Butte’s high society. Caroline Fair attended affairs with Mrs. A.H. Heilbronner, Mrs. Reno Sales (he was chief geologist for the Anaconda Company) and many others.

1907 advertisement

S. Robert Fair died May 20, 1914. His widow Caroline and son George R. continued to run the Fair Drug and Assay Supply Co., but in 1918 they moved the operation a block to the east, to the corner storefront in the new Arizona Hotel on the southeast corner of Park and Arizona. The drug store address was 200 E. Park. In 1918 George was living at 628 W. Quartz. Caroline, Robert’s widow, died in 1944. Her daughters Katherine, Caroline (McCarthy), and Nellie (McDaniel) lived in Butte until the 1960s. Katherine died in September 1963, when she was living at 317½ N. Alabama Street.

The Fairs continued to run the drug store in the Arizona Hotel until about 1936-37, when Ben Gunnary took over. The original drug store building, 115 E. Park, served as the Union Grill for most of the 1930s and was known as Frank’s Café in 1954. In the late 1950s and early 1960s both 115 E. Park (Jim’s Trading Post) and the Arizona Hotel corner store were used furniture shops.

Arizona Hotel c. 1919

The Arizona Hotel was demolished about 1965, and the west half of the 100 block of East Park was removed in 1967-68. About 1971 the Burger Crown restaurant was built on the site of the Arizona Hotel. The Burger Crown burned May 4, 1975, and today that space is the parking lot for Sparky’s Garage Restaurant.

About 1969, the present building went up on the site of 115 E. Park and that half of the block. It held Currie’s Tire & Appliance Center for years, and many still refer to it as the tire store. Where it stands today, in 1900 there were nine storefronts on Park and five more on Wyoming, plus various outbuildings. Among the businesses were a tent manufacturing factory, two restaurants, a Chinese tailor, two saloons, one bakery, an auto dealer, a hat shop, a sausage factory, a liquor store, and a cleaner.

Sources: The Story of Butte, Butte Bystander, April 15, 1897 (source of main photo), in Gibson’s collection; The History of Montana, by Helen Fitzgerald Sanders, Volume 3, 1913; Congressional Record, Montana Senatorial Election Hearings, Feb. 5, 1900; Anaconda Standard, May 21-22, 1914; August 12, 1912; June 30, 1907; March 24, 1901; Sept. 21, 1963; Advertisement from Souvenir History of the Butte Fire Dept., 1901, Butte Public Library scan; Invoice, dated Dec. 30, 1900, to The Butte General Electric Co., purchased 45¢ worth of tubing and paid the bill 1/17/1901, via Rocky Mountain Museum of Military History (Ft Missoula); City Directories; Sanborn maps.

The January 15, 1895, explosions

By Richard I. Gibson

“Alas! Alas! What woe it wrought! What pain, what sorrow, what blight to human hopes! Only the recording angel, with pen dipped in tears, can truly write the story of that awful night.”

Jim the horse in 1901, at the Arizona Street Station,
which still stands (pawn shop today).

January 15, 1895, a deadly date in Butte history: the multiple explosions of illegally stored dynamite in the warehouse district. Almost the entire Fire Department was wiped out.

Dave Magee, hose-cart driver, was one of only two of the nine fire fighters who responded to the call and survived. And the story of a horse named Jim who saved Magee is true—Magee was blanketing the horses against the cold when an explosion threw one horse into him, killing the horse and injuring Magee. The protection offered by both the dead horse and Jim the survivor saved Magee’s life. Jim subsequently became an icon of the Fire Department, and of Butte.

Magee was so severely injured that he could not drive the wagon, but he rode in the 3,000-member procession that honored the fallen fire fighters and the many more volunteers and bystanders who died that cold January night. The final count will never be certain, because the violence of the explosions literally destroyed human bodies, but the most common count is 58 dead. This was, I believe, the second most deadly event in Butte’s history, second only to the Granite Mountain Disaster in 1917.

Map of the area. Iron Street today goes
about through the center of this map.

A contemporary list of the dead reveals a microcosm of Butte: 56 white, 1 colored. Forty single men and boys, 14 married, 1 widower, 2 unknown. Six from Germany, four from Ireland, five from Canada, two from England, one from Norway; native-born Americans were from New York (8), Pennsylvania (3), Utah (2), Montana (2), and one each from Dakota, Minnesota, and Ohio, with 21 whose nativity was unknown. The ages of the dead ranged from 12 to 78; at least a dozen teenagers were killed. Twenty-two others were in their 20s.

Research note: There’s always more to learn. I’d been saying that there were three survivors within the Fire Department (because that’s what I was told years ago), but the contemporary accounts make clear that there were only two. Besides Magee, the other survivor was John Flannery who was manning the plug, well away from the force of the explosions.

Resources: The Great Dynamite Explosions at Butte, Montana, January 15, 1895, by John Francis Davies, 1895 (scanned by Google—source of map, quote at top, and image of devastation); Souvenir History of the Butte Fire Department, by Peter Sanger, Chief Engineer, November 1901 (scan by Butte Public Library—source of photo with Jim the horse).