The first block of East Park Street

North side of Park Street, Main to Wyoming, circa 1893. See bottom for annotated version.

By Richard I. Gibson

Somewhat remarkably, most of the buildings in the photo above are still standing. You are looking at the north side of Park Street between Main and Wyoming. From left to right, the buildings are

1. Owsley Block, northeast corner of Park and Main, with the turret. Site of NorthWestern Energy construction today. 

2. Narrow building with a tall turret. Parking lot west of Trimbo’s today, lost in 1973 fire that destroyed Owsley Block (Medical Arts Building).

3. Owsley Block #2, with the prominent bay front. Trimbo’s today.

4 – 5 – 6. Of the three buildings east of Trimbos, two definitely still stand, and probably all three. The first one, with the high second story, is Owsley Block #1. Then there are two buildings of equal height. All three of these buildings are occupied by Rudolph’s furniture today. The façade on the third building has been modified a lot but I think the original building is still in there.

7. The little one-story building is gone, replaced in 1917 by the Chester Block (Whitehead’s) which still stands.

8 – 9.The massive block with the two large awnings is the Shiner Block (Exer-Dance), vacant but still standing in 2015, and the corner building, the Key West House (lodgings) and Bray’s Butte Cash Grocery, is occupied by Rediscoveries today.

This photo dates to 1892 to 1895. The Owsley Block was completed in 1891-92, and The Butte Cash Grocery was located on this corner from 1887 to 1896. The Key West House was not in business under that name in 1895, but of course the sign might still have graced the façade.

The trolley line started in 1890. You can see the tracks in the center of a dirt Park Street. I believe the sidewalks are made of wood, and note the fire hydrant in front of the Butte Cash Grocery and the policeman leaning on the telephone pole to the right.

Courtenay, Case, & Gravelle Company (“Gents Furnishings”), advertised on the east face along the top of the Owsley Block, was incorporated in 1891 and had its store in the big corner building at Park and Main. Joseph Gravelle had come to America from his native France in 1889. After the store closed in 1906 he moved to Waitsburg, Washington to open a store under his own name. Courtenay left the partnership in 1897, to be replaced by Ohioan Arthur Ervin; the store changed its name to accommodate that change in ownership. Joseph Case came to Butte in 1880 from his native San Francisco, to which he returned when the store closed. Ervin also left Butte in the early 1900s.

A.F. Bray

Absolom F. Bray was a more permanent fixture in Butte. He was born Oct. 21, 1852, at Langdon Cross, Cornwall, England, and came to America in 1876. He established his first grocery in Butte about 1885, but failing heath drove him to California for a time. He returned to open the Butte Cash Grocery in 1886. It was originally located at the site of the Murray Bank, the northwest corner of Copper and Main, but he moved to the site in the photo above, Park and Wyoming, the next year. In 1889, Bray was elected to the first Montana state legislature.

“He had a voice that could make a boatswain’s rumble sound like a whisper” – A.F. Bray in the legislature.

When the photo above was made, the store was a typical retail grocery, but in 1896 he moved to the corner of Park and Arizona and focused on the wholesale trade as well as retail. He was doing $1,000,000 a year in revenue by 1901.

“Every nook and corner are crammed with the finest assortment of staple and fancy groceries that the markets of the world can furnish.” —Butte Cash Grocery, in Western Resources, 1901

A.F. Bray died September 5, 1906 in Butte. His son, A.F. Bray, Jr., born in Butte, became a prominent member of the legal profession, serving as the chief judge of the California Court of Appeals. Bray Jr. died in 1987 at age 97.

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Sources:
I do not know the source of the photo at top. It is too old to be in copyright, so it is public domain and free to use, but I would like to credit the source if someone knows.

Courtenay Case & Gravelle store information 

A.F. Bray Jr. 

Progressive Men of Montana; Western Resources, Denver, CO, June 1901 (Bray photo).

Quote about his voice from Walton History, By Shirley W. Cozad

Butte Cash Grocery advertisement from Anaconda Standard, May 29, 1896.

Courtenay Case ad from Anaconda Standard Almanac 1893, digitized by Butte Public Library

Annotated to show buildings including present-day occupants. Owsley and the one labeled #2 are gone today.

The Coughlins of Granite Street

By Richard I. Gibson

“Esteemed Woman Called By Death”
—Anaconda Standard, June 7, 1929

223-223½-225 E. Granite. Photo from Jean Koskimaki's collection.

Julia Coughlin’s death at age 66 ended the 45-year tenure by her family in the 200 block of East Granite, between Arizona and Ohio Streets, straight across from the Washington School. For nearly 30 years of that time, Julia ruled the household and the businesses there as a widow.

Julia was born in California about 1863, and came to Butte in 1881. James H. Coughlin came to Butte about the same time (at least by 1885) and based on the estimated ages of their children, they likely married around 1889. James was a carpenter, working that year in the Anaconda Mine and living in a home at 219 East Granite. By 1896 he was working at the Ground Squirrel Mine #1, low on the flank of the Butte Hill just above East Mercury Street and about 8 blocks east of the Coughlin home on Granite.

In 1891, a new two-story duplex went up next door to the Coughlin home, at 221 (later, 223-225) East Granite. The Coughlins moved down the block to another new, single-story duplex at 227.

James Coughlin died in 1900, leaving Julia with at least three and probably five children. They continued to live at 227 East Granite until 1908, when daughter Ellen was in High School. But that year, the family moved to the big duplex at 223-225 where Julia established a confectionery (candy store); it’s likely that Julia bought the property. In 1909, Ellen was a student at the Butte Business College; children William, Julia (Nettie), Helen, Ray, and Tom were also living at the 223-225 address. [Note: it is not completely certain without more extensive research that all these names reflect Julia’s children. Based on ages and occupations, it seems unlikely that they were siblings of the deceased James, but not certain. They all lived in the building at 223-225 East Granite.]

By 1913, Ellen was a teacher, William was a student, Ray was a machinist at the Black Rock Mine, and Tom was a bellboy at the Thornton Hotel, a couple blocks from home. He moved a little further afield the next year, becoming a bellboy at the new Leggat Hotel. In addition to her ongoing management of the confectionery and working occasionally as a clerk, mother Julia became a teacher at Emerson School in 1914. By the early 1920s, the place at 223½ East Granite was a full-blown local grocery store, with Julia listed as the storekeeper, and she was still teaching school as well. Ray was delivering for the Ryan Fruit Company. About 1927, Ray joined his mother in managing the Coughlin Grocery. It appears that Tom and Ellen had moved away or died by then, but mother Julia, daughter Julia, Ray and his wife Pearl, and William were all still living in the big duplex with the grocery.

Julia died June 6, 1929, and son William, who moved to the old home at 227 E. Granite, apparently committed suicide by drinking cyanide November 7, 1932. The following year there were no Coughlins living in this block for the first time since 1885. Ray was an attendant at the Broadway Service Station and living with Pearl at 110½ N. Wyoming, not far from the old family home, and he was also president of the Butte City Council. Daughter Julia followed in her mother’s tradition, becoming a teacher at the Blaine School in Centerville.  She died July 24, 1947.

A grocery store continued at 223½ East Granite until 1939, managed successively by Mrs. Ann Krisk, Mrs. Ann Condon, and Harvey Fort. After the store closed, the place became residential only. A few people continued to live there until 1977, when the building was demolished. Today, this entire block is vacant except for a lone surviving miner's cottage.

Resources: Sanborn Maps, City Directories, Anaconda Standard June 7, 1929. Photo of 223-225 East Granite from collection of Jean Koskimaki, courtesy of Kathy Carlson.

I'm not from Butte

By Richard I. Gibson

I’m not from here, but I live here. According to many locals, I’ll never be from here, and the differential between “native” and “outsider” is sometimes intense enough to feel. And sometimes there’s no differentiation at all: there is no one Butte, and no one characterization of its people.

But whether or not I’m from here, I still thrill with wonder on a subzero night, walking down Park Street past the Mother Lode Theater, where ice crystals sift down like glittering columns in the narrow spotlights above the multicolored Masonic symbols. I can imagine (only imagine) what it was like to have an ore train pass within arm’s length of your house, as I walk along the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railroad trail, as I capture in the sweep of one eye the Immaculate Conception Church spire, the Desperation Fan Tower, and the century-old M on Big Butte. The pigeons still congregate atop the Desperation as it breathes warm air out from the depths of the Anselmo Mine which it served.

300 block of North Main (1942): all gone.
Library of Congress.

I walk down North Idaho Street, Mary MacLane’s “surprising steep Idaho Street hill,” in the footsteps of 3,000 mourners who followed Tom Manning’s casket from Scanlon’s house, now gone from the 300 block three blocks from my own home, to the cemetery, honoring his death at the hands of the Company in the Anaconda Road Massacre a few blocks to the east. Here and there, until the road crews patch them, trolley tracks emerge through worn asphalt. They recall summer Thursdays, childrens’ days at Columbia Gardens when kids rode the trolley for free for a day of wonder and freedom and fun. Trolleys last rode those rails in 1937, but the streets themselves reek of Butte’s history.

A few cracked and patterned sidewalks still bear the imprint “City of Butte 1910.” Were these the very pavements that Carrie Nation trod with her Prohibition fervor that year? Or did Emma Goldman, “the most dangerous woman in America,” an anarchist arrested in connection with William McKinley’s assassination, but later released—did Emma Goldman walk here on her way to the Carpenter’s Union Hall to speak on “the white slave trade” in 1910?

There’s a new building replacing Maguire’s Opera House where Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin performed, a new building built in 1914. There’s a new building at the corner of Granite and Main, where Dr. Beal’s Centennial Hotel, opened on July 4, 1876, once stood. We call that new 1897 building the Hennessy, and it was headquarters for the Anaconda Company for three-quarters of a century.

Can you hear men’s voices on North Wyoming Street, where the Finlander Hall stood? On a hot August night listen carefully, and you might hear bits of “Solidarity Forever,” echoing down the decades from a similar August night in 1917 when Frank Little spoke at the Finlander and was dragged to his death from the boarding house next door. The song’s voices are accented, out of tune, but unified in their vision. Or go a block north and listen for the murmur of a thousand tired men pouring down the Anaconda Road at shift change. Of all the things that Butte has lost, and there are many, the sounds, the noise, the din of mines, machinery, mules, and the traffic of people in motion and busy and active is one of the most noticeable. Many are the old-timers who had no watch, but knew the time from the mine whistles, each with its own signature sound and direction. Even today, the silent headframes and the lay of the land make it a challenge to get lost in Butte, at least geographically: headframes, Highlands, Big Butte, and East Ridge define your position better than a map. Getting lost in time in Butte—that’s another matter. That’s pretty easy, for people who are from here, and for people like me, who are not.

Stephens Hotel turret, Park and Montana.
Library of Congress.

Can you smell the noodle parlor aromas in Chinatown? You might, because one of the three survivors in Chinatown is the Pekin, still in operation after a century and still in the same family. Especially in China Alley behind the Pekin tantalizing spices grab your attention—but don’t forget this alley was also a scene of death, a shootout that took several lives during the tong wars in 1922. Nothing in Butte is one dimensional.

Can you smell the open sewer that ran through the Cabbage Patch and the East Side? No, it’s long gone, and there are nice new buildings straddling its old location east of Arizona. But look around with 1884 eyes and you’ll see the ditch, a flowing stream for a while, that came out of Dublin Gulch, provided some water to the Butte Brewery on North Wyoming, then continued south to Silver Bow Creek. All filled and paved and gone now—unlike the gulch that came south from the Original Mine, east of the Court House, through the heart of town. That one is paved over, but not gone: the 10-foot-high 1884 culvert that channeled the flow to the subsurface still serves Butte, and was under repair in 2012.

A hundred stables dotted central Uptown Butte in 1884. No smells there, of course.

Can you smell the arsenical fumes that came from open fires, smelters for Butte’s first ores? No, but you may find arsenic in your yard or in your attic. Don’t eat the dirt. Bladder cancer killed my dog, and between them two veterinarians knew of seven cases of canine bladder cancer, all from Butte.

On any Uptown corner, be prepared to be jostled by ghosts in their thousands. Watch out for the ladies in their tight bodices, come to watch the million-dollar-fire on Park Street in 1905, or the crowd that gathered for a similar fire a block west on Park Street in 1972. Or enjoy the camaraderie of ghostly folks out and about, taking care of business, shopping for anything, everything that money could buy, anywhere in the United States—Butte had it. High-end Everitt cars? Yes, in 1910, when it “costs but $1,900” from Tom Angell’s dealership at 10 North Wyoming. I can see folks taking that test drive down Wyoming to Park, certainly turning right or left since another block or two would take them into the red-light district. But even a well-paid miner earning $3.50 a day probably saw owning the Everitt as a pipe dream.

Can you taste the food of thirty nations? Grapefruit in winter? Certainly, from any of a dozen different grocers even in the 1890s. Italian specialties from Savin Lisa’s stores on East Park; solid meat and potatoes in Irish boarding houses, from the Florence Hotel’s dining room that seated 400 to Mary Buckley’s house in Corktown where 30 men gathered to a meal; Cornish pasties in a Walkerville miner’s lunch bucket, and tamales, chop suey, Greek mixtures, and homemade – take your pick.

Butte accosts the senses, all of them. Feel the winter wind cut down an alley, or a moist spring breeze filled with promise, even though there may be snow on the ground in June or July. Those winds blow on to Ireland and Cornwall and Lebanon and China and your families left behind. Does that make it easier to work with the death and dirt of the mines? There’s something this outsider can’t really know.

No, I’m not from here, but Butte is in my blood and brains, and it will never go away.

100 years ago today

Photo from Library of Congress, HABS/HAER collection, 1979.

February 7 marks the centennial of Lutey’s Marketeria in the Stephens Block at Park and Montana. It was the first self-serve grocery store in the United States.

Lutey’s stores were established initially in Granite (now a ghost town) in 1889. Joseph Lutey moved the operation to Philipsburg in 1895 and finally into Butte in 1897, where he and his sons built it into one of the largest grocery chains in Montana.

Joseph Lutey was a Cornishman, born in the village of Morvah, about 8 miles from Land’s End at the far southwest tip of Great Britain, on Christmas Day 1849. He came from a family of yeoman farmers and tinners, inasmuch as this part of Cornwall boasts both agricultural country and tin mines. Joseph’s own background was in mining; he came to the United States in 1868 (age 19) and worked the mines of New York, New Jersey, Colorado, and Nevada before landing in Montana at Granite in 1887.

The first Butte store was at 47 West Park (the Thomas Block). Joseph died in 1911 and the business continued under his sons until about 1924. The Marketeria was prominently located at 142-144 West Park, at the corner of Montana in the Stephens Block that still marks this corner (Hilltop Market today). The ghost sign shown here is on the south façade of that building.

The 2007 Chinatown Archaeological Dig (financial support from the Butte URA; exhibit at the Mai Wah supported by the Montana State Historical Society and Mai Wah volunteers) uncovered a large broken crock advertising Lutey’s “fine pickles and pure vinegar” from the c. 1920 Chinese trash midden at the dig site, in the vacant lot south of Mercury and east of Colorado Street.

The Lutey’s self-service grocery was the model for Piggly Wiggly stores, the first widespread self-service chain in the U.S. You’ll find rich detail on the Lutey’s stores in Kent Lutey’s article “Lutey Brothers Marketeria,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 28 (1978): 50-57.

New Year's Eve, 1897

By Richard I. Gibson

The society corner in Victorian Butte newspapers recorded all and sundry events, including New Year’s Eve parties. The item here, from the Butte Bystander for January 8, 1898, reports such a gathering at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Erastus Thomas, 213 East Quartz (not West Quartz; the article is in error). East Quartz is one of the oldest parts of Butte, with the first cabin allegedly built there in the 1860s. By 1900, there were 58 dwellings in the block bounded by Granite, Quartz, Arizona, and Ohio Streets. Four were three-story boarding houses and six were two-story homes, four-plexes, and apartments, while the rest were single-story homes, but many of the latter had additional buildings that were likely inhabited. It’s reasonable to estimate that the population of this block exceeded 200 in 1900. Today, there are two houses in this area.

The narrow single-story Thomas home must have been crowded with 27 party-goers at a sit-down dinner. The house was built between 1888 and 1891 as part of the Thornton Addition, so it was fairly new in 1897. The location was convenient, just two blocks north of the site of the Washington School, two blocks east of the Butte Brewery, and immediately below the Parrot Mine complex where Erastus worked as an engineer.

The 1897 New Year’s Eve party list reveals the cosmopolitan nature of Butte. We can determine that the attendees came from all over Butte, and from all walks of life. Mrs. Ellof Peterson managed a boarding house at 10 E. Gagnon Street; Martin Brecke was a miner who lived at 725 N. Montana. Michael Geiger, who attended with his wife and daughter, lived at 1109 W. Woolman where he ran the Home Industry Publishing Company. The Bjorglums were probably Mr. and Mrs. Martin Bjorgum. He was a tailor with a shop at the northeast corner of Main and Mullins in Centerville; he and his family lived at #6 O’Neill Street in Walkerville. Another tailor, George Erickson, worked for Henry Jonas at 11 E. Granite Street, but lived at 503 S. Montana.

Mary Hoban, widow of John, boarded at 107½ West Quartz (The Sherman, which stood immediately west of the O’Rourke Building, in part of today’s jail/BSB parking lot). Another widow, Mrs. Albertine Minger, establishes a connection to the East Side: she lived at the boarding house at the northeast corner of East Galena and Shields Avenue, just below the looming Pennsylvania Mine headframe at the southern margin of the Butte Hill. The two-story building there also was home to party attendees David Trotter (a machinist), and Louis Demars, who both lived there and operated a grocery store at the same location. Demars also ran a confectionery at 323 S. Main (across from where Naranche Stadium is today). Today, the old corner of Galena and Shields is under the waste rock on the rim of the Berkeley Pit just a bit northwest of the viewing stand; Shields has been significantly relocated.

The party list gives a cross-section of Butte’s middle class, from tailors and grocers to engineers, publishers, machinists and miners, boarding-house mistresses and widows living (apparently) independently.

The Butte Bystander was a short-lived labor-oriented newspaper published from 1890-1898 (as the Butte Bystander, 1890-97, and just The Bystander in 1897-98).