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.

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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. 

“It’s a free for all”

“The senatorial fight begins to grow warm”

By Richard I. Gibson

The headlines above focused Anaconda Standard readers on December 31, 1894 on the ongoing U.S. Senate contest. (Click image at right to enlarge the article, then "view image" and click the plus to make the image bigger) Wait a minute – the Senate race was still in progress December 31? Wasn’t the election November 6? Well, yes. But remember that state legislators elected U.S. Senators then, and they did not meet until January to do that deed.

The 1894 election in Montana was overshadowed by the state capital fight, won by Helena over Anaconda (by the narrow margin of 51.8%), but the vagaries of politics in Montana were well in evidence in other races as well.

Montana only had one senator in 1894, because one seat was vacant. The legislature in 1893 had failed to choose a senator in one of W.A. Clark’s first hard-fought campaigns. Various machinations led to the Governor appointing Butte’s Lee Mantle to the post, but the U.S. Senate did not seat him, in part because of opposition to cases where gubernatorial appointments came about due to legislative inaction, and perhaps in part through Clark’s lobbying. In any case, the newly elected 1894 state legislature would meet in January 1895 to elect two senators instead of the usual one: first, a short-termer, to fill out the vacant slot, and the other to the regular six-year term.

Lee Mantle

With a Republican majority in the state legislature, the contests were basically among republicans (leaving Clark in the cold until 1899). Which of the two winners would serve the 4- and 6-year terms? That was not decided until the legislature conducted the election itself. Ultimately, Lee Mantle, Butte Mayor in 1892, founder of the Inter Mountain newspaper, and player in the Destroying Angel case, filled the short term and served from 1895 to 1899, while Thomas Carter, a Helena lawyer, was chosen for the regular term and served from 1895 to 1901 (and a later Senate term as well, 1905-11).

Thomas Carter

Governor John Rickards, who had appointed Lee Mantle to fill the vacancy in 1893 which he ultimately did not fill, was also a candidate. Although he was a Butte real estate and insurance businessman, apparently some of Mantle’s supporters rejected him as an outsider. For his part, as reported in the article here, Rickards said “I am ready to shake hands with Mr. Mantle at any time as a friend and as a stalwart, faithful, hard-working republican.”

For much more about Montana politics in the 1890s, see Michael Malone’s The Battle For Butte, especially pages 94-105.

Images of Mantle and Carter from Wikipedia; Anaconda Standard article from Dec. 31, 1894, from Library of Congress.