Walkerville, 1881

Walkerville, 1881. Photo by Charles Roscoe Savage. See bottom for annotated version.

By Richard I. Gibson

In a previous post we dissected a photo of Butte by Charles Roscoe Savage that was most likely made in 1881. Today I’m focusing on a second Butte photo in the Savage collection, digitized by Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library. This one is a remarkable view of Walkerville, presumably also from 1881.

Although Butte was taking off in 1881, rising from the population nadir in 1874, Walkerville had a more stable early history in part because of its silver. The Butte mineral district is zoned with concentric sections like a sliced onion, and the outer rings are more silver rich. The mines on the west side, including the Travona and Orphan Girl, were mined for silver much more than for copper, and the same was true on the north side, in Walkerville. Any silver on the south is buried beneath thick sediments on the Flats, and on the east side, the silver-rich zone was uplifted along the Continental and other faults and has been eroded away.

Marcus Daly famously came to Butte at the behest of the Walker Brothers of Salt Lake City to manage and develop the Alice Silver Mine in Walkerville. Daly brought his expertise in the Comstock Silver Belt of Nevada, but eventually made his real fortune in the copper mines of Butte.

Walkerville’s official population in 1880 was 444 (compare Butte at 3,364) but by 1890 it had quadrupled to 1,743 in the census, and nearby locations likely doubled that. The photo above, looking north, shows the heart of Walkerville, with buildings lining both sides of Daly Street across the foreground and Main Street running north on the right side of the photo. The big two-story building with three windows is the Caplice & McCune Store, a building that is still standing. Two buildings south from the store, the Rainbow Saloon, on the southwest corner of Main and Daly Streets, also offered boarding and lodging. W.H. Peck and H.J. Hurley managed it in 1885. By 1888 it was called the Light House Saloon.

The little shop on Daly with the front porch, in front of the left-most window of the Caplice & McCune Store, was a meat market in 1884. West (left) of it, the Head Quarters was another saloon. Further west on Daly, the three white-fronted stores were (from right to left) L.W. Fosters general merchandise, a saloon with billiards, and a boarding house with a large dining room in 1884.

New Alice Stamp Mill, 1884. Redrawn from Sanborn Map.
Click to enlarge.

The two big mine complexes at the top of the hill above Walkerville are the Moulton to the left and the Alice to the right. The Alice was connected by a tramway to the New Alice Stamp Mill. The old mill is the complex of buildings above the Caplice & McCune Store, in front of the hoisting works on the skyline. Both stamp mills would have been in operation when this photo was made (or maybe not literally in operation at this moment, given the lack of dust and smoke). In 1884 the Alice mine and mill employed about 65 men per shift, probably two shifts of 12 hours each (the 8-hour day and three shifts a day only became common in the early 1900s). In addition to the big stamp room, the Old Alice Stamp Mill buildings included a leaching room, a stone-walled retort, settling tubs, dryers, a dust house, and an engine room adjacent to the three boilers that generated 720 horsepower of steam energy. The new stamp mill added 6 boilers at 300 horsepower. The combined mills had 100 stamps and a processing capacity of 90 tons a day.

The Moulton Stamp Mill, in the buildings to the left (west) of the Moulton Mine stack, had 40 stamps and a 40-ton-per-day capacity, and 30 employees. There were “frequent strong winds from west and northwest” at the Moulton. Ya think?

We think the other photo of Butte by C.R. Savage was made about September, 1881 on the basis of under-construction buildings and the nature of the shadows, which suggests the autumnal equinox. If this photo was made about the same time, which is likely, the Alice was probably well lit by electric lights. The first electric light in Montana had been lit there November 17, 1880. When the City Council, Mayor Valiton, and a crowd of citizens (“some accompanied by ladies”) visited the Alice a few days later to see the sight, the Butte Daily Miner reported

“Notwithstanding a blinding snowstorm was raging, the entire party was treated to a most beautiful sight as they approached Walkerville. On top of the [Alice] hoisting works appeared a light which in the escaping steam seemed like a ball of fire rolling in the heavens, while through the windows of the mill the light shone beautifully distinct and cheerful.”

Resources: 1884 Sanborn map; Butte Daily Miner, November 24, 1880; November 18, 1880; city directory for 1885. See also these additional posts about Walkerville.

Annotated version of the photo. Daly Street in yellow.

Friday Photo: Walkerville

I'm shamelessly stealing an idea from Ellen Baumler's Montana Moments blog. Here's a Butte History Friday Photo for you.

The scene is Walkerville, around 1900, with part of the Alice mine complex in the background. Image from Library of Congress.

Three more Walkerville posts can be found here.

A Walkerville party

By Richard I. Gibson

H.O. Christenson, the invitee, was a clerk; George Holbrook was a carpenter. William E. Hall was superintendent of the Alice Mine, and Frank Kramlick was proprietor of the American House hotel on the north side of West Daly Street in Walkerville (the labeled building on the Bird’s-Eye view is probably the American House, but not for certain).

George Hillebrand was foreman at the Lexington Stamp Mill (the “new” mill in Walkerville, not the old one that stood at present-day Lexington Gardens, Broadway at Wyoming Street) and Carroll, Reimel, and Coppedge were mill workers there. The mill was connected to the Lexington Mine on Main Street by a series of trestles.

Walkerville and the Lexington Mine and Mill (click to enlarge)

Fisher was an amalgamator at the Alice. He would have worked the machines that combined mercury with gold to free it from the rock. N.C. Anderson was a miner and Charles Bruhn was a butcher, the Butte partner of Nick Bielenberg in a meat market.

All the members of the party committee lived in Walkerville at a time when there were no street addresses, though most of the streets were probably there and named. They all lived on Daly or Main St except for Anderson, who lived on Dunn.

The AOUW was the Ancient Order of United Workmen, a fraternal organization that began in Meadeville, PA, in 1868. Its goal was to adjust “all differences which may arise between employers and employees, and to labor for the development of a plan of action that may be beneficial to both parties, based on the eternal truth that the interests of labor and capital are equal and should receive equal protection.” Members paid $1 into a private insurance fund for members’ survivors—the AOUW was the first fraternal organization to offer this. By the middle 1920s, lodges were merging and insurance took precedence over the fraternal aspects. The organization eventually evolved into the Pioneer Mutual Life and other insurance companies.

The Walkerville Hibernia (AOH) hall where the ball took place stood on Main Street just south of the intersection with Daly.

Invitation and envelope from Steve Henderson’s collection (scanned by him). The postmark appears to be 1889, but it is a smudged 1885. It would not have been a "Montana Terr." postmark in Dec. 1889, since Montana was a state at that time. Bird’s-Eye view, 1884, from Library of Congress, annotated by Gibson.

Walkerville 1884

by Richard I. Gibson

from 1884 Bird's-Eye View, via Library of Congress. Annotations by Gibson.

Walkerville began early because of the nature of Butte’s minerals. The district is like an onion, with the core layers most copper rich, and the outer zones more silver rich. That’s why the Orphan Girl mine on the west side produced more than 7,000,000 ounces of silver before it closed in 1956 (but that's less than 1% of Butte’s silver) and why Walkerville grew up in the 1870s, before Butte’s real boom began.

Named for the Walker brothers of Salt Lake City who invested there, Walkerville held the famous Alice Mine (where Marcus Daly got his start), as well as massive associated mills. The Valdermere and Magna Charta Mines stood atop the hill to the east, and the Allie Brown, Lexington, Josephine, La Plata, and others bordered Walkerville on the south.

In 1884, much of this industrial complex was interconnected by a series of trams and railways, taking ore from smaller mines to central mills. Walkerville held one of McCune and Caplice’s largest general stores (on Main just north of Daly). The Rainbow Hotel, run by E.D. Sullivan, was on Main Street a bit north of the Lexington. The old Walkerville School on this illustration is not the Sherman School that still stands in Walkerville today.

Walkerville’s official population in 1880 was 444 (compare Butte at 3,364) but by 1890 it had quadrupled to 1,743 in the census, and nearby locations likely doubled that.

The Caplice Block

Caplice Block at lower left. Click to enlarge.

By Richard I. Gibson

The Caplice Block was one of the larger buildings in Butte in 1884. It stood at the southwest corner of Park and Montana, and it included a general store on the north side (facing Park) with tenements above on the second and third floors. The rest of the building was a dance hall and performance theater, with dressing rooms adjacent to the Montana Street entrance. The tenements extended above the dance hall as well. In 1888 the store was a liquor store, likely Caplice Commercial Company or its predecessor, John Caplice & Co.

A “French roof” suggests that the building was in Second Empire style, probably with an ornate upper section similar to today’s Finlen Hotel. This is also suggested by the appearance on the Bird’s-Eye Map view seen here (big building at lower left of general view above, and at the right edge of the street-level view of West Park below).

Caplice Block at right (building faces east). Click to enlarge.

Sutton’s New Theater occupied the Caplice Block by 1900, with an entrance on Park, although a store still occupied much of the north side. In 1916, the entire building was gone, replaced by four narrow 3-story stores, all opening on Park Street. Those are gone now, too.

John Caplice and his partner Alfred McCune were Utah businessmen who became active in Butte in the early 1880s. Caplice was born in Tipperary, Ireland in 1829 and was at Bannack in 1863. He died in 1903. In addition to the huge building at Park and Montana, the partners had a general merchandise establishment on Main Street north of Daly Street in Walkerville, several other stores around southwest Montana, and were involved in the initial construction of the Montana Central Railroad in 1886. The MCRR reached Butte November 10, 1888, and became part of the Great Northern in 1889. McCune lived for the most part in Salt Lake City, where his 1900 home is considered to be one of the finest mansions in the West.

John Caplice’s story is complex, including law suits involving the Schlitz Brewing Company. I had never heard of him before, but he’ll get another post or two in the future. McCune has his own Wikipedia entry, as does his house.

Bird's-Eye Views, 1884, published by J.J. Stoner, via Library of Congress.