Granite and Main, 1890-91

by Richard I. Gibson

Butte was booming in 1890, with a surging population of at least 23,000, up from about 4,000 a decade earlier. New buildings by the score, together with the street cars and other traffic, made the corner of Granite and Main a busy place as the illustration by C. Winsor, above, shows.

Many of the buildings in this view survive. Most of the west side of the 100 block of North Main below Granite is buildings dating to before 1884, damaged but not destroyed by a devastating fire in 1889. The corner building, D.J. Hennessey’s three-story mercantile, was his third location. He began his business a ways down Main, above Broadway, but by 1889 was leasing space in the 2-story O’Rourke building on the corner. It burned down in the 1889 fire, and was replaced within a year by the 3-story structure in the image above, which survives to this day. The Hennessey Building we know today, across the street, was Hennessey’s 4th location. It’s hard to see in the image, but the site of today’s Hennessey is an almost vacant lot in the drawing. The Centennial Hotel that stood there had burned down in 1888, and in 1891 the corner was occupied by five little shacks, each measuring about 10 feet by 20 feet. They housed a newsstand, a tailor, a fruit seller, a clothier, and a meat market.

Connell’s store, where Hennessey got his start in Butte, is at the far right in the upper image, left in lower image. Although the 5-story corner tower is gone, it’s my understanding that the heart of the present-day NorthWestern Energy building there is still this original building. The Marchesseau and Valiton Block (better known as the Beaver Block) at far left (right in lower image) is gone, lost to demolition and fire in 1968.

For much more information about Daniel Hennessey, see Zena Beth McGlashan’s book, Buried in Butte. Image from “A general view of Butte,” drawn by C. Winsor, circa 1891 (its source, the Montana Memory Project, says this is 1887, but it cannot be earlier than 1890).

Before the Hennessey, there was the Centennial Hotel

August 5, 1879, Butte Miner

By Richard I. Gibson

Volume 1, No. 1 of the Butte Miner, August 5, 1879, includes front-page ads that suggest Butte was already becoming a settled metropolis rather than an ephemeral mining camp.

Eight physicians and surgeons advertised their services, as well as one dentist. Dr. J.W. Beal, a native of Ohio, had practiced medicine at Alder Gulch and German Gulch for 12 years before coming to Butte in 1876. In addition to his work in medicine Beal was an entrepreneur, building and running the Centennial Hotel (opened July 4, 1876) at the corner of Main and Granite where the Hennessey Building stands today, until the hotel burned down April 24, 1888. He served in the territorial legislature and was elected Butte mayor in 1881. He died at German Gulch, where his son owned at least two mines, on June 8, 1901 at age 73.

Centennial Hotel, photo ca. 1880,
via Montana Standard (copy in BSB Archives files)

The two-story Centennial Hotel in the photo here included a saloon run by Beal’s son-in-law George Newkirk, an office, the 30-by-40-foot dining room, kitchen, laundry, wood house, and a two-level outhouse, as well as a nearby ice house. George Newkirk’s Butte mineral collection was reported to be the best in the Territory and was (perhaps) sent for display at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia.

A minimum of eight lawyers and notaries provided legal aid to the growing town. Three assayers offered their analyses, while a watchmaker and jeweler held forth at Dellinger’s store on Main Street.

Henry Valiton’s livery stable at the West Park Street Bridge (presumably the bridge over Missoula Gulch) rented barouches (fashionable carriages with collapsible hoods to protect the passengers from the elements), bench wagons, sulkies, covered carriages, and saddle horses, and claimed to have the finest hearse in Montana. The stable had a “GRANITE FLOOR” superior to any other in Butte. Like Dr. Beal, Valiton went on to become a Butte mayor, and partnered with Marchesseau in the 3-story Beaver Block that stood at the corner of Granite and Main (where the Wells Fargo Bank is today) until it burned in 1968.

The St. Nicholas Hotel advertised a dining room that could seat 100. It was on East Broadway, straight across from the site of the 1890 City Hall, and bragged that it was the largest hotel in Butte.

All this in a city whose population in the 1880 census was 3,363.

Christmas in Butte, 1911 – #6

Orton Brothers Music Store and Heilbronner's, circa 1959.

by Richard I. Gibson

North Main Street has harbored music stores for more than a century. Today’s Len Waters building (119 N. Main) has been there since before 1884. In 1928 Leonard Waters was a Department Manager for the prestigious Orton Brothers Music Co., a block north and across the street, at 216-218 N. Main (next door to Heilbronner’s). In 1911 Orton Brothers stocked the largest number of pianos in the state, including a Chickering parlor grand in mahogany for $550. Second-hand pianos could be had for as little as $100, but at prices like that, pianos were obviously for the upper crust. The miner’s wage was still $3.50 a day, as it had been since 1878.

Butte Miner, December 1911

General furniture was much cheaper, and at Hennessey’s you could buy on time—creating some of the first credit purchases in America. Lauder Furniture and Carpet offered a leather couch, in solid oak with gold finish for $12.95. Some chairs cost as little as a couple dollars.

Musical entertainment centered on the theaters, where live bands supplied the accompaniment to silent movies as well as to near-continuous vaudeville performances. “Dante’s Inferno” was touted under the banner “Know Ye That the Greatest Moving Picture Production Ever Gotten Out Begins Today at The New Orpheum Theater.” Because there was only one set of reels anywhere in the United States for this “film of the century,” the Orpheum raised its admission to 25¢ for adults and 15¢ for children under 14—who were apparently admitted despite the film's reputation as the first in history to feature male frontal nudity.

Ad from Butte Miner, December 1911. Photo from Butte-Silver Bow tax assessment cards at Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, digitized by Don Plessas.  

Christmas in Butte, 1911 – #1

by Richard I. Gibson

Hennessey’s, Symons, and Connell’s, Butte’s largest department stores, typically all ran full-page ads in the run-up to Christmas a hundred years ago. Each also appears to have generated new original artwork every day of the season, at least in December.

While Hennessey’s offered real moving picture machines that “show pictures the same as in theaters … complete with films, for either oil or electricity, at $2.00 and up,” across the corner at Connell’s you could buy a four-volume leather-bound copy of Don Quixote at $5.85 for the set, or a pair of boys’ school shoes for $1.48.

Symons, the “economists for the people” and the “toy headquarters for all Butte” carried “splendid sleds, good and strong, nicely painted” for 45¢ (marked down from $1.00), while a discriminating lady could get a nice $50.00 velvet coat on sale for $29.50.

The ads below are from the Butte Miner, December 1911. Click to enlarge.