What Was There? 69-71 West Broadway

By Richard I. Gibson

Although later Sanborn maps say the building that stood here was built in 1898, the 1900 map shows three vacant 1- and 2-story dwellings “damaged by fire,” and I believe that the 5-story Miner Building was erected in late 1900 and 1901. News reports have the foundation being dug in August 1900. At about the same time, the Butte Miner also constructed a smaller building further west, at 121-125 West Broadway, to serve as corporate offices, and the two new buildings together replaced the small one at 27 W. Broadway, which the Miner had certainly outgrown by 1901. The Miner used 121-123-125 W. Broadway as its masthead address starting December 1, 1901, when they ran a front-page announcement of the “new and enlarged Miner.”

Deseret News, Aug. 28, 1900

The Miner Building was built like a skyscraper, with a steel frame supporting concrete floors and the roof. In addition to editorial offices, this was the printing headquarters for not only the Butte Miner, but other publications that used the Miner’s equipment. One example is the Montana Catholic, published from here in the early 1900s. The building also housed offices for accountants and attorneys.

In 1928, three years after W.A. Clark died, the squabbling among his heirs was over, and his son Will (W.A. Clark, Jr.) had lost. All of Clark’s assets, including the Butte Miner and its two buildings, went to the Anaconda Company, and the Anaconda Standard newspaper took over the Miner; the combined paper became the Montana Standard which had offices in this building into the early 1960s.

Toward the end in 1928, all of Clark’s surviving companies had their offices here, including the Elm Orlu Mining Co., Timber Butte Milling Co., Moulton Mining, the Clark Law Library, Clark-Montana Realty Co., and the Butte Electric Railway Co. (the trolley service), in addition to the Butte Miner. All were headed by W.A. Clark, Jr., in 1928 until the August takeover by Anaconda, and most were on the upper floors of this building.

Immediately to the west (left in photo at top) was the Empress Theater* which burned in 1931 and was demolished in 1935 to create a pass-through gateway for Greyhound buses. The Miner Building was demolished in 1965 to expand the bus pull-through, and the present parking structure was built in the early 1990s after the bus station moved.

*second of that name; originally the Lulu, then called the Orion; renamed the Empress when the Empress across the street, in the Maguire Opera House building, burned in 1912; the opera house was replaced by the Leggat Hotel.

Resources: Montana Catholic, January 21, 1905 (photo); Deseret News, Aug. 28, 1900 (article); city directories; Sanborn maps. The story of newspapers in Montana history is told in Dennis Swibold's book, Copper Chorus.

“My friends call me Zig”

By Richard I. Gibson

C.O. Ziegenfuss is certainly not a common name in Butte history, but he was a renowned newspaperman of the last quarter of the 19th Century. He seemed to follow trouble, and he made the news several times while reporting it.

One of his early assignments, for the Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Times, was to cover the June 21, 1877, hangings of activist Irish coal miners—the Molly Maguires. He made his way west within a few years of that event, and was in Butte by 1886, working as editor of the Butte Miner when it was located at 16 W. Broadway, an address that evolved to 27 W. Broadway, in the building that was remodeled in 1906 to house the Butte Floral Company.

During Zig’s short (8-month) tenure as the Miner’s editor, he was nearly murdered there in the newspaper office, on June 23, 1886.

At 5 o'clock this evening a desperate attempt was made to assassinate C. O. Ziegenfuss, editor of the Miner. The would-be murderer is a carpenter named Miller, whose daughter eloped a few days ago from Anaconda with a young fellow named Harrington. Miller pursued the couple to this city and found them occupying an apartment together. He compelled Harrington to marry the girl and then went around town boasting of what he had done. Next morning the Miner contained a brief account of the affair, and in the afternoon Miller visited the newspaper and demanded a retraction. Editor Ziegenfuss told him he would investigate the matter and publish a retraction if one was deserved. Miller went away apparently mollified, but returned later in an intoxicated condition and made a nuisance of himself, generally. This evening he returned again and requested a private interview with the editor, who conducted him to the editorial room, up stairs. When the head of the stairs was reached Miller suddenly grasped Ziegenfuss with one hand and, drawing a pistol with the other, fired at his head. The bullet whistled past its target, and Ziegenfuss and the shootist rolled down the stairs together. In the descent the pistol was dropped and Miller after being severely pummeled by an attache of the business office, was given into custody. A charge of an attempt to kill will be entered against him to-morrow. Mr. Ziegenfuss was not injured in the least by his rough experience, and numerous friends are congratulating him upon his narrow escape. Public feeling is strong against Miller.

That same month, Zig was appointed to lead the New York World’s expedition to Alaska to check out rumors of gold in the territory acquired by the U.S. 20 years earlier, but as far as I can tell that expedition never happened. By 1890, Ziegenfuss was in California, where he soon became known as one of the preeminent newsmen of the West Coast. He served in various editorial and reporting positions at the San Francisco Chronicle, the Calaveras Citizen, San Francisco Post, Stockton Mail, Fresno Republican, Fresno Expositor, San Francisco Examiner, and the Republican of Phoenix.

He made the news in Fresno in 1897 and Calaveras in 1900, both times as the victim of attacks by citizens irate at the way they were treated in his newspapers—but he brushed both off as he had the skirmish in Butte.

By 1902 Zig was editor and proprietor of the Manila American, in the Philippines. He returned to San Francisco in late summer 1902 because he contracted malaria and dysentery in the Philippines; the Manila newspaper was for sale. He was found dead in his hotel room November 6, 1902, asphyxiated because a gas burner was turned full on. Suicide was suspected initially, but the death was ruled accidental. His remains were cremated at the San Francisco Odd Fellows’ crematory and sent to his mother in Pennsylvania; the San Francisco Press Club conducted a memorial in his honor. It was recalled that “he had an inexhaustible fund of good humor, and was at all times considered the best of companions.” In 1895, when he managed the California News Agency on Bush Street in San Francisco, he was quoted as saying "I admit that I have rather a hard name to spell or pronounce, and that is why I encourage my friends in their proclivity to call me 'Zig.' "

Resources: San Francisco Chronicle's special Butte reporter, published in Los Angeles Herald, June 24, 1886 (main quote of Butte story); Engineering & Mining Journal, July 3, 1886; San Francisco Call, Sept. 19, 1895 (source of sketch); San Francisco Call, Nov. 7, Nov. 9, Nov. 12, 1902; Butte Bystander, The Story of Butte, 1897, p. 67; Sanborn maps; city directories.

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.

On research

I spend a lot of time seeking information in the Butte newspapers at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. This can be challenging, in part because without a date, you really don’t know where to look. But even when you do know the date of an event, exploring the old papers can be very very hazardous—because you can get caught up in reading the papers, to the point of forgetting your original purpose. That’s fun, of course, and an enjoyable way of spending time, and often enough turns up other things of interest and other avenues to explore.

Both the Butte Miner and the Anaconda Standard had high standards of reporting and writing, and both had some rather dry humor in their editorial notes. The following, from the Miner for October 25, 1896, is recorded in its entirety:

“John D. Little, a Philadelphia prophet, predicts that the world will come to an end on Nov. 1. A full account of the disaster will appear in The Miner of the following day.”