Butte 1914

by Richard I. Gibson

I had the honor of speaking to Butte’s Homer Club on May 5, 2014, the occasion of their 122nd annual Spring Banquet. The Homer Club is the oldest women’s club in Montana, dating to 1891. This post is modified slightly from my presentation to them.

This year, 2014, is a great year for anniversaries. It’s the 150th anniversary of the Territory of Montana, the 150th birthday of artist Charlie Russell, and the 150th anniversary of the first prospectors here in Butte.

It’s also some important Montana centennials – 100 years since women got the vote here, and 100 years since the destruction of the Miners Union Hall, which touched off some incredible, internationally significant labor unrest.

So I thought I would talk a little today about Butte in 1914.

Butte in 1914 was approaching its peak – the peak of population, the peak of copper production. In 1914 Butte probably had around 80,000 people, maybe more, on the way to nearly 100,000 in 1917. As you know they were from all over the world, and from all walks of life, but mining was why Butte was here. More than 10,000 men worked underground in 1914.

The city had to be an amazingly active place. Every photo you see, the streets are filled with people, people, people. A lot of the historic buildings we still have today were standing in 1914. The Leggatt Hotel opened its doors that spring, rising from the ashes of the Maguire Opera House that had stood at that site since 1888. On the east side, Tony Canonica was building his tin shop on South Arizona Street. In the heart of town, the Iona Café was under construction on Main, across from the Metals Bank. You may remember it as the State Café.

Most of the main uptown streets were probably paved with granite pavers, those blocks about the size of a loaf of bread – hundreds and hundreds of them. Park Street was probably paved about 1908, and I suspect that Broadway and Granite, as well as Main, Montana, and Utah followed pretty quickly.

I’m not sure, but I suspect that residential side streets like Quartz and Copper and Silver probably were not paved yet, even on the well-to-do middle class west side. But they did have concrete sidewalks, at least in places. The oldest “City of Butte” sidewalk with a date in it that I’ve seen is 1910, somewhere around Galena and Alabama. There is one at the corner of Idaho and Quartz dated 1914, and there are a fair number of 1916 dates in sidewalks around the uptown. So Butte was definitely cleaning up its act, and the best of everything any merchant could offer, anywhere in the United States, was available in Butte in the 1910s.

Why? Because even though it was a mining town, it was also the largest urban metropolis in the whole vast area from Minneapolis to Denver to Salt Lake City to Spokane. An upscale, cultured metropolis, as the beginning of the Homer Club in 1891 proves. As an aside, when I was researching things for this talk, I discovered that the first meeting of the Homer Club was at the home of the founder, Mrs. Caspar, at 409 West Quartz – just a block from where I live. That little house is still standing, too. The west side was just taking off then, but within 10 years or so things were pretty well built up to Excelsior and beyond.

In 1914 Minnie Bowman was your president. Her husband was president of the Montana School of Mines, and they lived at 1020 Caledonia, with the BA&P railroad behind their back yard. New bungalows were going up a couple blocks west on Caledonia in the spring of 1914. Minnie was succeeded as president by Lina Speer, who lived at 508 South Main where she managed the Princeton Apartment building.

Minnie probably shopped in all the stores in Uptown Butte. That spring, she could have bought pillow cases at 10 for a dollar at Hennessys, or bought her husband a raincoat for $5. Maybe she bought shoes at Symons – marked down from $5 to $2.35, or found a silk shirt for herself at Connells, for $1.95. As the wife of the President of the school of mines, Minnie must have entertained frequently. If she needed a piano, the Howard Music Company on North Main, where Len Waters is today, had low-end used pianos for $125, and high-end ones for $500. Orton Brothers music across the street offered expensive pianos with a time payment plan - $1 a week – but I bet Minnie would shop at the Howard Music Company, because Blanche Howard, wife of the owner, was recording secretary of the Homer Club that year. They lived at 518 North Henry, and their neighbor at 514 was a well-known Homer Club member. Just the year before, 1913, Helen Fitzgerald Sanders had completed her massive three-volume series covering the History of Montana.

Dr. Ironside was one of the most prominent dentists. If you needed a full set of dentures in 1914, it would run you $10 to $35 per set.

For entertainment, perhaps you’d go to the Orpheum on Park. In May 1914, The Fulfillment was playing – three reels of a “stirring drama with situations that unfold scenes of unparalleled sacrifice and emotion.” Pretty much, it was boy meets girl, girl loves another boy, boys become best friends, girl rejects boy #2, who is to be boy #1’s best man, boy #1 tries to rescue Boy #2 from an inferno, is reported dead; Girl becomes demented; boy #2 recants, brings girl and boy #1 together in marriage and serves as Best Man. All that for 10¢.

For live entertainment, you could go to the Empress on Broadway – the second Empress, as the first, which stood where the Leggatt Hotel is now, had burned in 1912, and the Leggatt had just opened its doors a few months earlier in 1914. At the Empress the greatest comedy variety show of the season was playing, “More Sinned Against Than Usual.” This live show cost 10¢ to 25¢ for the matinee, and up to 35¢ for the evening show. 

The headlines of the day, in May 1914, focused on Mexico – the Mexican Revolution and Civil War were in progress, and Poncho Villa was in the news almost daily. The first week of May 1914 the Anaconda Standard had a photo of US troops raising the American flag in the Mexican port of Vera Cruz.

The Butte Coppers baseball team had traveled to Idaho to face the Boise Irrigators on Opening Day. Manager Ducky Holmes would lead the team to second place in the league that year.

Women’s suffrage was also in the news almost daily. Thousands of women marched in a Great Suffrage parade in Washington DC on May 10. Suffragists in Butte were busy preparing for the visit of Grace Cotterill, wife of the Seattle mayor who spent the week in Butte. She spoke three times at the Carpenters Union Hall and led meetings all over town, from Hornet Street below Big Butte to the Napton Apartments to Texas and Grand Street.

The mining world was reeling from the news on April 20, from Colorado, of a massacre of striking coal miners. Two dozen, including women and children, were killed by the Colorado militia and company thugs at a tent city outside Trinidad Colorado, at Ludlow. The army banned the importation of guns and ammunition to the state of Colorado, fearing that they would arm either striking miners, or mine guards, or both.

The Ludlow Massacre must have stirred the emotions of miners here in Butte. The miner’s wage was $3.50 a day, a pay rate that really was pretty high for hard labor, among the best pay in the United States. But it had been $3.50 a day since 1878 – 36 years without a raise, while the price of copper tripled. Tempers were raw, and radical activists including the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, saw an opportunity.

Just two months after the Ludlow Massacre, at the Miners Union Day parade here on June 13, activists, drunks, someone stirred up the crowd, and a mob attacked the Union Hall on North Main Street. The place was ransacked and the safe taken.

10 days of fighting, dissent, conversation, and argument culminated in the dynamiting of the Union Hall on June 23, 1914. That event is easy to point to as the ignition, the spark, that touched off six years of labor history here in Butte that echoes down the decades to this day. It led to Frank Little coming to Butte and his being murdered here – and people come to Butte today from all over the world, from London, from Berlin, to see his grave and the city that killed him. It led to the sedition act that resulted in people being arrested for saying anything at all against the US government, the war, or the Anaconda Company. It led to the Anaconda Road Massacre in 1920 that put an end to the labor movement here for close to 20 years. At that point, the company’s control was absolute. They controlled more than just the mines – they essentially controlled the state of Montana. They controlled the legislature, the state supreme court, and they owned most of Montana’s newspapers. I don’t like the way you look – you’re fired! YOU were talking to the cousin of an IWW agent. You’re fired. That was not legal, but it did not matter. They did what they wanted.

Five days after the Union Hall was dynamited, the news headlines changed. Archduke Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, and the War to End All Wars began. The repercussions in Butte would be huge – but that’s another story.

Through it all, Butte of course continued its day to day life, and the Homer Club continued to meet. If I had to say, I would suspect that most of the Homer Club’s members in 1914 would have been pro-company. In many ways, class distinction trumped ethnicity and religion, and it’s unlikely that a simple miner’s wife would hob-nob with the high-class ladies of Butte’s society pages.

In addition to President Minnie Bowman, wife of the School of Mines president, your 1914 corresponding secretary, Cora Copenharve, was the wife of the City Editor of the Anaconda Standard, the mouthpiece of the Anaconda Company. Treasurer Ada Messias’s husband was the chief clerk to the W.A. Clark Interests. That might have caused some interesting tensions, since Clark’s vocal opposition to the Anaconda Company was well known, even though by 1914 he was spending little time in Butte. 

Among your members in 1914 was the widow of Daniel Hennessy – he owned the Hennessy Department Store and the building that housed the company. He died in 1908, but his widow continued to live in the mansion at the corner of Park and Excelsior.

Then there’s Mrs. John Noyes – matriarch of a family grown rich by selling mines to various copper kings and huge swaths of Butte land to real estate developers. The Homer Club met at her large house on East Granite at Wyoming within the first year of its founding, in 1892. That house is gone today.

Mrs. John D. Ryan was another Homer Club member in 1914. Ryan became not only the president of the Anaconda Company, but president of the Montana Power Company as well, and was one of the most powerful men in the United States. Their mansion is on North Excelsior.

In 1914 the Homer Club was focusing its meetings on a study of all aspects of drama. The late April meeting topic was Famous Actors and Actresses and how they influenced playwrights of their time.

1914 was a pretty amazing year, in Butte and in the wide world.

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1914 newspaper images from collection at Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives

Skookum Dolls

By Richard I. Gibson

The popular collectible miniature Indian dolls called “Skookum Indians” were invented in Missoula by an entrepreneurial widow, Mrs. Mary McAboy (1876-1961). A year after her husband Frank died in 1912, Mary created miniature Indians using a stick wrapped in straw or grass for a body and dried apples (red MacIntosh was favored) for heads. Small swatches of fabric wrapped the figure in a blanket and provided a hat.

Maine-born Mary McAboy started the business in Missoula in September 1913, and by December had three girls helping her, working overtime to keep up with demand. They made more than 1,500 before Christmas 1913, and had an order for 10,000 of the figures to go to the Montana exhibit at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco the next year. Mary applied for and was granted a patent on the dolls in 1914.

Although Mary made the first dolls for a display in Missoula where she lived, it may have been the prominent collection in an East Broadway store window in Butte in the run-up to Christmas 1913 that provided enough impetus for the business to expand.

By the 1920s, the dolls were so popular Mary partnered with a Denver company, but she stayed the head of the Skookum Assembly Division, retiring in 1952. The dolls were sold as popular tourist souvenirs throughout the American West into the 1960s. Materials changed – plastics and other materials instead of apples – and the business thrived. Today, prices for Skookum dolls from the 1920s-1940s bring $500 and more from collectors.

Resources: Anaconda Standard, Dec. 21, 1913 (source of images); Skookum Doll history; Mary McAboy history.

The Mikado Dining Hall

by Richard I. Gibson

Annie and Katie Nesbitt, sisters, opened the Mikado Dining Hall on October 1, 1894, in the Barnard Block at 15 West Granite Street. They had been in the restaurant business for at least a few years—in 1892 Annie managed and Katie was a waitress at a café at 45 West Granite. Prior to that, they were reportedly “engaged in conducting fashionable boarding places.”

The eastern store front of the Barnard Block, on the site where the Montana Standard is located today, was part of a large 2-story building that was nearly destroyed in the fire of September 29, 1889. Although heavily damaged in the fire that began across the street, and although reports of the day indicated it burned to the ground, it appears from the Sanborn maps that the basic structure survived and a third story was added during the restoration. The 3-story Barnard Block stood here until the middle 1950s when another fire consumed it, and the present 2-story Montana Standard building was erected.

By 1910 the sisters had moved the Mikado a few doors west, to 41 West Granite, and their original restaurant in the Barnard Block was occupied by Peter Barrenstein’s saloon. Various stores occupied the space until the fire in the 1950s.

New construction about 1917 eliminated the building at 41 W. Granite, and by 1918 the Mikado no longer existed and the Nesbitt sisters appear to be gone from Butte.

Resources: Butte Bystander, special edition, April 15, 1897 (photo) in Gibson’s collection; city directories; Sanborn maps.

Greeley School

Silver Bow Park neighborhood
Thornton Street at Park Place
Built: c. 1898

Greeley School was built along with many others in Butte as a response to the exploding population in the late 1890s. First through Eighth Grades were taught at Greeley in its early years. Following are some of the staff at Greeley in 1905 and 1910, revealing a diversity of origins, and residences scattered all over town.

1905

• Principal Mary Moran, Montana native, 15 years experience (13 in Butte)
• Marguerite McDonald (New York), 6 years experience (4 in Butte), graduated State Normal School, Winona Minn.
• Bertha Konen (Illinois), 3 years (7 months Butte)
• Annie Moses (Michigan), 1 year (7 months Butte)
• Kathleen McDonald (Michigan), 5 (3)
• Bessie Vaughn (Wisconsin), 2, (7 mo.)
• Ida Hillas (Ontario), 13 (3)
• Harriet Ballon (Zanesville, Ohio), 17 (3)

In 1910, only one teacher from 1905 was still at Greeley:

Principal Kate Stafford. Teachers: Anna Sennett, Elsa Fasel, Mary Harrington, Ada Myersick, Fannie Spooner, Alice Maguire, Kathleen McDonald. Janitor: John Boyd.

John Boyd the Janitor lived at 525 W. Silver. Principal Kate Stafford roomed in the Pennsylvania Block on Park Street. Ada Myersick roomed at 1212 E. Second St. Kathleen McDonald – 606 W. Park. Fannie Spooner – 207 W. Park.  Mary Harrington – 185 E. Center. Elsa Fasel roomed at The Dorothy (corner of Granite and Wyoming).

Alice Maguire – 807 W. Galena (with Mary (widow of John), Nellie, and Grace. Perhaps Mary was the mother of three sisters, all of whom were teachers). Anna Sennett – 411 W. Quartz, where she lived with Helen Sennett, teacher at Emerson, along with other Sennetts: James – clerk Hennessy’s; John – miner; Mary – stenographer; Nora (widow Michael) – grocer 306 N. Jackson. 411 W. Quartz was a busy place for such a small home!

Third Graders at the Greeley School in 1905 were to be able to answer these questions:

How were the canyons and gulches formed? What would the level valley south of town indicate? What are sand, clay, loam, alluvium? Note.—Some of the most common properties of the minerals (quartz, feldspar and mica) could be taught here with profit.

On the subject of language,

The chief result to be obtained from the study of language is power of expression rather than a knowledge of grammar. The power of expression, however, is useless unless one has something to express. In this branch of work it follows, therefore, that the activities are two-fold, (1) the getting of knowledge, and (2) the proper facility in giving expression thereto.

Third graders would read Robinson Crusoe.

Greeley had served as a community center for several years before it closed in 2004. After several years of discussion among the Butte School District, County Commissioners, and the Public Housing Authority, with nothing coming of it, in 2013 the school was sold to Doug Ingraham who plans to try to save the historic building and return it to viable use.

Resources: Annual Report of the Board of Education and City Superintendent of Schools, Vol. 18, 1905; digitized by Butte Public Library (source of photo).

Elizabeth Lochrie

By Richard I. Gibson

Like many early Butte residents, Elizabeth Lochrie started in Deer Lodge. Elizabeth Tangye Davey was born there July 1, 1890. Her paternal grandfather had come to Montana in 1866 seeking gold; his son, her father, moved to Deer Lodge in 1887. Her mother May (nee Rogers) had Cornish ancestry.

In Deer Lodge, Elizabeth’s father trained horses, reportedly selling some to Marcus Daly. He was killed by a ruffian when Elizabeth was 12, and her mother was supported in part by philanthropy from some of Butte’s finest, including businessman Dan Hennessey. She also taught school in Butte, commuting from Deer Lodge.

While Elizabeth had shown interest in art from an early age, her first formal training was in about 1904, with Deer Lodge native Vonna Owings, who had studied in San Francisco and went on to become a founder of California’s Laguna Beach Art Festival. Elizabeth graduated from Brooklyn’s Pratt Art Institute in 1911 and returned to Deer Lodge where she married bank manager Arthur Lochrie.

Lochrie home at West Granite and Emmett Streets

Elizabeth’s professional painting career began as a newspaper cartoonist in 1915, but in 1923 she was commissioned to paint murals in the state tuberculosis sanitarium at Galen. During the Depression, she designed murals for post offices in Dillon, MT; Burley, ID; and St. Anthony, ID. Her work was also displayed at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

By 1928, as Arthur’s career expanded, the Lochries moved to Helena and Spokane, and eventually (1931) to Butte where Arthur was president of the Miners Bank. Their Butte home at 1102 West Granite Street still stands. It formed their household, Elizabeth’s studio, and an exhibition gallery for her increasingly well-respected work.

Elizabeth Lochrie is most noted for her depictions of Native Americans and their settings, and she is a fixture in most books on western art. One of the last exhibitions in her lifetime was in the late 1970s, at the Charles Clark Art Chateau in Butte, where some of her works are on permanent display. She continued to live in Butte until a few years before her death—she moved to Ojai, California to be near her daughter, and died there in 1981.

Primary biography: A HALF-CENTURY OF PAINTINGS BY ELIZABETH LOCHRIE, By Betty Lochrie Hoag McGlynn, with gallery of paintings.

A Christmas tragedy

Officer Tom O'Neill (left) and grocery store manager Frank Walsh (right).

By Richard I. Gibson

Thomas O’Neill was born in Butte November 14, 1898, and attended Parochial schools, graduating from Butte Central. He dropped out of Mt. St. Charles College (Carroll) in Helena to enlist in the marines in 1918, and following the armistice worked as a machinist for 16 years; for fun he played football for the Dublin Gulch and Centerville teams. In the summer of 1934 he joined the Butte police force.

Tom’s father, John P., was well known to Butte as “The Rimmer.” He was superintendent of the Anaconda, Neversweat, and St. Lawrence mines in the 1910s and 1920s, and drowned tragically at Boulder in 1924. His widow, Tom’s mother, was expecting Tom at her house for dinner about 4:30 Christmas Day, 1935, but he never arrived.

Jean Miller

Two more Christmas dinners were about to be served earlier that day, in apartments at the Merriam Block, 538 S. Main Street (a parking lot today, across from the Scandia Bar). The boardinghouse manager, Betty Clifford, was entertaining her daughter and son-in-law, Mr. & Mrs. Frank Walsh, and a friend of the Walsh’s, Bob Clark. Frank was assistant manager of the New Market and Safeway store on Harrison Avenue.  Next door, Florence Benevue was preparing dinner for her sister Jean Miller when William Henry Knight appeared at the door demanding to see Jean. Florence sent him away—knowing him to be an ex-con who had beaten Jean repeatedly in the past, though he was also a sometime resident in the house. He returned with a gun, while Florence was seeking help at the Clifford apartment. Frank Walsh ran across the street to the Scandia, where former policeman Harry Kinney and Walsh summoned the police.

Tom O’Neill and James Mooney responded to the police call. When they arrived at the Merriam Block, they found Mrs. Benevue shot and Knight gone to his room at the rear of the building. O’Neill, Mooney, Walsh, and Kinney charged his room, to be met with gunshots. O’Neill was killed instantly; Walsh died from his wounds later that night. Mooney was badly hurt but survived, and the shots aimed at Kinney missed him.

Knight fled. Using stolen vehicles and on foot he made his way up the Madison River where he killed Floyd Woods, a ranch caretaker, then worked his way through Ennis and eventually back to Butte on December 27 after an attempt to reach a hideout in the hills above Anaconda failed because of heavy snowdrifts. He went to a house at 11 S. Oklahoma (parking lot of the WET building on East Park today), where lived Knight’s acquaintance, James Gilligan, who worked for Knight six years earlier, at the Montana Cafe. Gilligan was gone to work for the WPA on the Thompson Park project when Knight arrived. He held Hazel Gilligan and her children, age 5 and 2, hostage all day until James returned home. Then, somewhat inexplicably, he allowed the family to take the children next door, where they promptly called police.

A tear-gas barrage cornered Knight in the house, and assistant police chief Jack Duggan shot him down in the house when he assailed the police with a hail of bullets.

Knight had also killed deputy sheriff Tom Meahan near Seattle six weeks earlier. He had bragged to Jean Miller about that murder, and it was speculated that one reason for the Christmas Day encounter was Knight’s fear that Miller might implicate him in that death; Knight was also believed to be addicted to narcotics.

Tom O’Neill was living at 22 N. Main Street when these events occurred, in an apartment upstairs in the 3-story building south of the BS Café-Rookwood Speakeasy, with the Ley’s Jeweler Ghost Sign. His mother’s home at 417 N. Wyoming (corner of Copper) is also still there; she probably moved to that location after her husband John “The Rimmer” died—before that, they lived in the last house up the Anaconda Road, a stone’s throw from the Anaconda Mine itself. Frank Walsh, age 24, and his wife lived at 2401 Harvard Avenue, another house that still stands. Officer Mooney’s home, at 919 S. Utah, a half block above St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, is still there as well. Even the duplex at 633 S. Main, where Harry Kinney lived, is still standing. But the sites of the most deadly action, 538 S. Main and 11 S. Oklahoma, are gone.

Officer O’Neill’s portrait is part of the collection of plaques honoring fallen officers, in Dan Hollis’s collection, which can be seen in the City Jail on an Old Butte Historical Adventures walking tour.

Sources: City Directories, Sanborn maps, Montana Standard newspapers Dec. 26-28, 1935.

Mrs. E. Creighton Largey (1884-1939)

Largey mansion, Broadway at Washington Street. The multi-columned home directly to the left is Largey Flats, built for visiting relatives and friends of the Largey family. It survives; the mansion burned down c. 1965. See below for more images.

By Richard I. Gibson

Even though Urusula Largey and Julia Coughlin only lived about seven blocks from each other, it’s pretty unlikely that they ever met. The divide between 223 East Granite and 403 West Broadway was deeper than the Mountain Con.

Ursula March was a well-known actress on the New York and traveling stage in the early 1900s. She played the female lead in the musical fantasy “Land of Nod” for two seasons about 1905-07. Butte’s E. Creighton Largey followed the company from town to town, courting Miss March, and they were ultimately wed July 22, 1908 (many sources say 1907, but it is almost certainly 1908), with write-ups on the wedding in New York theater gossip columns.

Creighton was the younger scion of Patrick Largey, often called Butte’s fourth copper king. Patrick started in Butte managing the Butte Hardware Company, but by 1890, when Creighton was three years old, Patrick had established the State Savings Bank, was a partner in Butte’s first electric and power generating company, and helped start the Inter Mountain Publishing Company. He would be a millionaire well before his murder in 1898, an event which set Creighton up as heir and co-manager of the estate.

After Ursula and Creighton married and set themselves up in the Largey mansion in Butte, directly across the street from the Charles Clark mansion (Arts Chateau), they became central to Butte’s social whirl.

In February 1910 Mrs. E. Creighton Largey threw a party to honor the first wedding anniversary of Mr. & Mrs. Phil Carr. It was a lavish affair, with Ursula and Creighton receiving at least 34 guests in the second floor red drawing room, likely comparable in size to one floor of Julia Coughlin’s home. An “elaborate, delicious” supper was served at midnight; miniature railroad cars honored the Carrs; “immense wedding bells of cotton sparkling with crystal dust” decorated the premises along with white satin streamers and asparagus vines; the edible ices were designed as flowers, doves, and hearts. Place markers at table were commissioned works of art. Guests included Dr. and Mrs. Frederick McCrimmon and Fred McQueeney.

The hostess wore a satin gown of orchid hue, and “her only adornments were diamonds.” She performed an impromptu musicale, recalling her stage career.

It was at a party similar to this one, also hosted by Ursula Largey, but across the street in the Charles Clark Chateau which the Largeys then owned, that the state song of Montana was written.

When Creighton and Ursula “tired of a life of ease” and left Butte in 1915, they headed to Los Angeles, where among other things Ursula helped form and directed the Venice Community Players, part of the growing “Little Theater” movement. She died in 1939. Creighton survived her by 24 years, dying in Los Angeles in 1963.

Resources: The Butte Evening News, Feb. 27, 1910; New York Dramatic Mirror, August 1908. House photo from A Brief History of Butte, Freeman, 1900, scanned by Butte Public Library.

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Photo that is almost certainly the Largey House. Courtesy Sara Rowe (Sassy's Consignments) The central bay shows some changes from the photo above, but it is very similar to the drawing below.

Largey house, circa 1902-03, Artist W.H. Thorndike, republished in Montana Standard, 12/16/2014.

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.

Gertie the Babyseller – where she lived and worked

For background, context, and a photo of Gertie, see this link.

By Richard I. Gibson

Casey Block: Gertie probably lived in
the basement apartment here.
Her office was next door (to the left).
Photo by Dick Gibson

Gertrude Pitanken (maiden name not known) was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1887, and came to Butte by 1907. Trained as a chiropractor, she worked as a nurse at the old St. James Hospital where she may have met her husband, Dr. Gustav Pitanken. Gustav died July 22, 1930, age 66, and Gertie assumed his practice, which included abortions.

When Gustav died in 1930, he and his wife had an office at 511 Metals Bank and they lived at 663 Colorado with one Henry Davis. The following year, Gertie moved her office to 616 Metals Bank and married William Van Orden, who had retired from the Butte Police Department in 1929. She presumably moved to his residence at 119½ Hamilton Street, in the basement of the Casey Block at the corner of Hamilton and Granite. She was definitely living there by 1934.

Gertie maintained her office at 616 Metals Bank until 1940, when the office was relocated to the top floor, #85, in the Hirbour Tower at Broadway and Main. The 1940 directory is confusing in listing her residence as Columbia Gardens (there was a small neighborhood of that name near the amusement park) but it seems that she was also maintaining the residence with Van Orden on Hamilton Street. She’s back there by 1942, when her office relocated again, to 115 Hamilton, the Maley Block just south of the Casey Block. It was from this location that she sold babies into adoption in the 1940s and 1950s.

Casey Block (photo from Piccadilly
Transportation Museum web site)

The office continued at 115 Hamilton (third floor, I believe) until 1959, but Pitanken and Van Orden moved from the basement apartment at 119½ Hamilton to a home at 829 West Quartz about 1945; by 1952 Pitanken was living in the same space as her office at 115 Hamilton. Van Orden, who was listed separately in the Directories through all this, has disappeared by about 1950.

Gertie died April 19, 1960, and is buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery. 115 Hamilton was vacant in 1960.

Criminal charges were brought against Gertrude Pitanken three times: in 1929, for botched abortions, falsified death certificate, “not proved;” in 1936 (dismissed; later sanity commission declared her sane); and in 1939-40 – arrested at home (Columbia Gardens), charges were dropped. Gertie allegedly had incriminating information about city officials including judges, which resulted in her cases being dismissed. Whether that’s true or not is unknown.

Sources: Butte Archives VF 0681, 1745; city directories. With the exception of the Columbia Gardens neighborhood, I believe that all the locations mentioned above are still standing.

Alma Higgins

The Alma Higgins Christmas Tree (left center) dedicated Dec. 14, 2013. 200 block of West Broadway.

By Richard I. Gibson

Dec. 2013: Christmas tree to honor Alma Higgins • Another story

Alma Higgins

Alma Higgins came to Butte from her native Deer Lodge in 1920, when she was 46 years old. She was an active member of various clubs and organizations, and founded the Civic Improvement League of Deer Lodge in 1902; she and Montana Womens’ Clubs generally were leading forces behind the creation of the State Forester position in 1909, a precursor to the University of Montana’s School of Forestry.

Butte was ugly in the 1920s (called “the ugliest town in the world” by Time magazine in 1928), but Higgins worked through photography exhibits and letter-writing campaigns, as well as in eventually 18 Butte garden clubs to beautify Butte. Her “Garden Week” in Butte in 1922 became a national event (still celebrated) thanks to her lobbying and the designation by President Harding in 1923. I have to wonder if Harding met Higgins on his visit to Butte that year: There is always more to research.

Alma Higgins became known as the nation’s Christmas Tree Lady after promoting living Christmas trees, one of which became the first National Christmas Tree. She died in 1962, with a remarkable legacy of conservation and leadership—largely forgotten today. Norm DeNeal and his colleagues carry on her tradition, developing and caring for the Lexington Gardens, the flowers at the Berkeley Pit visitor center, and all over Butte.

Plaque in Butte's Higgins Memorial Garden
Click to enlarge.

There is a small memorial to Alma Higgins in Butte. The garden has been there since 1931; it sits against the retaining wall at the northwestern corner of the parking lot between First Baptist Church and the Covellite Theater (old First Presbyterian Church). The location is essentially the back yard of the old Montana Hotel that stood here until it burned down in 1988, and where Alma lived when she died March 16, 1962. Alma's friend, Ann Cote Smith, had the plaque made.

Reference: Janet Finn and Ellen Crain (Eds.), Motherlode: Legacies of Women’s Lives and Labors in Butte, Montana. Livingston, MT: Clark City Press: 2005, pp. 204-228. See also this post about Alma's father, Nick Bielenberg.

Images: I believe the historic photo of Higgins is in the public domain, via http://www.nwhistorycourse.org ; if it is not, let me know and I will remove it. The photo of the plaque in the Alma Higgins Memorial Garden in Butte is by Dick Gibson.

Murder at the Maule Block

By Richard I. Gibson

On February 6, 1903, Butte residents opened their Anaconda Standard to read a lavishly illustrated report of a lurid murder. The Standard’s five-column front-page story began, “One woman's infidelity to her husband, the jealous hatred of another married woman for the unfaithful one and the rage of a wronged husband seeking to avenge the destruction of his domestic felicity are the three principal factors in one of the most tragic murders Butte has known for a long time.”

35-year-old Emery Chevrier owned and operated a popular barber shop at 90 East Park on the southwest corner with Wyoming—and he was evidently quite the ladies’ man. In February 1903, at least three women—all married—were the objects of his affections. Mrs. Brooks was the latest, but all three had met Chevrier at a dance at the Scandia Hall on South Main the night of February 5. Chevrier and the three women walked up Main Street after the dance and dined together at the Chesapeake Restaurant on West Park at about 2:30 a.m. Chevrier and Bertha Brooks went to his room at the Maule Block and the other women left. It appears that one of them, Mrs. John O’Reilly, mother of four, was jealous of Mrs. Brooks, and went to the Casino Theater on Galena Street where Walter Brooks worked as a bartender. She informed him of his wife’s behavior and brought him to the Maule Block where Brooks burst into Chevrier’s room, found Chevrier with his wife, and shot him once. The victim fled but Brooks shot him a second time on the stairway landing, where he died.

Brooks admitted the shooting but pleaded self-defense, an accidental discharge of the gun during a struggle. The women were also arrested but were released over the next few days. The trial in March 1903 led to Brooks’ conviction for manslaughter after the jury deliberated for 21 hours.

The site of the murder, the Maule Block, was a three-story lodging house at 78-80 West Park. Symons Department Store owned the building and occupied the first floor, and a tin shop opened on the alley behind #78. Furnished rooms filled the upper floors. The Maule was erected about 1889 to replace the Warfield & Gwin Livery and Feed Stable that burned in 1888. Academy Street (later Dakota) was pushed through from Park to Galena after 1891, leaving two one-story stores at the corner west of the Maule and across from the Renhsaw Hall (Terminal Meat Market). The Maule had paired half-round turrets on the bay-fronted Park Street façade decorated with a two-foot parapet above the cornice. A sidewalk-level entrance in the middle led to the rooms upstairs, and a secondary external stair stood on the west side. The building was destroyed in a huge fire September 24, 1905; when Symons rebuilt in 1906, the new building was called the Phoenix Block which still stands today on the site of the Maule, York, and other buildings.

Emma Goldman comes to Butte

Emma Goldman c. 1911

Most students of Butte history know of one notorious woman’s visit to Butte in 1910: Carrie Nation brought her hatchet but had little impact locally, beyond entertainment. Another woman, prominent in her day, also visited Butte in 1910—Emma Goldman.

Not a household name today, Emma Goldman was indeed well known nationally in 1910, as an anarchist, anti-religion zealot, advocate for birth control and homosexual rights, and more. Butte culminated her five-month 1910 tour, which her manager boasted “had not a single encounter with the police.” Among her previous run-ins with the police was an arrest in 1901, following the assassination of William McKinley by anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Goldman admitted meeting Czolgosz, but disavowed any connection with his act; she was released two weeks later after “third degree” interrogation. (Image below, from Anaconda Standard, Sept. 22, 1901.)

In Butte at the Carpenter’s Union Hall on Granite Street Goldman spoke in June 1910 on “Francisco Ferrer and the Modern School.” Ferrer was a fellow anarchist and educator, executed in Spain because the church feared his teachings, according to Goldman. Her second speech focused on “The White Slave Trade,” by which she mostly referred to prostitution. Butte had quite a reputation in that area, of course, but it was a nationwide issue.

Goldman came to Butte three more times, in 1912, 1913, and 1914. Although she was an American citizen by virtue of marriage, her husband’s citizenship was revoked and courts held that had invalidated Emma’s as well. She was deported to Russia (her 1869 birthplace was in Lithuania, at the time a part of the Russian Empire) in 1920. She had become known as “the most dangerous woman in America.” Disillusioned with the Soviet experiment, she left in 1921 and spent the rest of her life—not quietly—in Europe and Canada. She died in 1940.

As a personal aside, as much as I know that Butte was an incubator for all manner of ideologies, and that all manner of people needed and wanted to visit Butte in those days, it pretty much freaks me out that Emma Goldman came to Butte four times. And spoke in places that I pass nearly every day.

Photo c. 1911 from Library of Congress via Wikipedia.

The Skagway Connection

By Richard I. Gibson

Mollie Walsh is a name that’s renowned in Skagway, Alaska—there’s a statue in a park named for her. Tour guides tell her story, for she’s one of Skagway’s treasured historical personalities. This reputed dance hall queen helped establish Skagway’s first church, and her grub tent high in the mountains helped save hundreds (some say thousands) of miners' lives as they trudged into the Klondike in 1897-98. She earned the name “Angel of the White Pass Trail,” but was murdered by a former lover in a Seattle alleyway in 1902 at age 30. It’s a movie-worthy saga.

What’s less well known is that Mollie lived in Butte for seven years.

She arrived about Thanksgiving, 1890, at age 18, from St. Paul. She apparently worked mostly in laundries, including the Troy Steam Laundry at 51 West Mercury (later at 232 S. Main). Mollie lived at 69 West Broadway in 1895, a small single-story rooming house. She also lived at 128 W. Granite – not the building there today (Venus Coffee Shop) but probably a rooming house (now gone) on the southeast corner of Granite and Montana—the address scheme changed in the 1890s.

The photo here is one of the most common ones of Mollie that you see around the internet. But usually the bottom caption is cut off; it reveals that the photo dates to 1894 in Butte. The Palais Studio was on the second floor at 120 North Main—in the Events Center building that still stands against the Hennessy Building.

Thanks to Nicole von Gaza for some of the information in this post, and to Cindi Shaw for finding the photo. Research continues to piece together Mollie’s Butte story.

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).

Hazel Earle, Clairvoyant

“In all ages and in all times man has sought to pierce the veil of the future, and with the advance of civilization and progress the occult exercises a still greater fascination for mankind…”



By Richard I. Gibson

In Butte, Rev. Hazel Earle practiced as a spiritual medium in her office at 47 West Park in 1901. She was an ordained minister, at least as far as the First Spiritual Progressive National Association of Utah was concerned – they gave her a diploma – and she was legally allowed to perform marriages and funerals. Her effort led to “no less than twenty-seven professional men, including lawyers and physicians” being converted to a belief in spiritual phenomena.

Rev. Earle reportedly pegged the time of Queen Victoria’s death in 1901 to within 75 minutes, two years before the fact. She conducted public meetings Sunday and Wednesday evenings, apparently including “life readings that would satisfy the most skeptical.”

The Thomas Block where Earle held forth (probably upstairs) burned down in 1912, but its 1913 replacement still stands on West Park Street. Some of her large public evening sessions were also conducted a few doors west, in room 36 at the Washington Block, which is gone today. Hazel Earle lived at 201 E. Granite Street, the Jacobs House on the corner opposite the Court House. Among her seven local competitors was Madame Vera Zazell, a clairvoyant and palmist who lived in Room 5 of the Stephens Hotel in 1902. She also reportedly assisted with mining exploration: she “is positively unexcelled and more than a few individuals have acquired large fortunes through following her advice.”

Earle practiced in Salt Lake City (258 Main Street, Room 2) in the summer of 1898 before coming to Butte. Uncertain records suggest that she was from Fayette, Iowa, and that she died in 1923. Despite her powers, she was only in Butte about a year, listed only in the city directory for 1901.

Image and quotes from Western Resources Magazine: Butte at the Dawn of the 20th Century (1901). Digitized by Butte Public Library, at Butte Digital Memory Project.

Who was Rose Rust?

Photo by Robert Edwards

By Richard I. Gibson

Rose Morrow Rust, "raised in Butte," was a Democratic candidate for the Montana legislature in 1916. The campaign card below was discovered by Robert Edwards in 2011. In the primary August 29, apparently the top 12 vote-getters went on to the general election in November; at the head of the list, it said "vote for twelve." Unfortunately Mrs. Rust came in 23rd in a field of 41, with 1,678 votes. The top vote getter got about 3800 votes and the 12th highest got about 2100. 

The general election of 1916 saw the first women elected to the Montana legislature, Maggie Smith Hathaway, Democrat from Stevensville, and Emma Ingalls, Republican from Kalispell. And of course it is well known that in that election Montana sent the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress, Representative Jeanette Rankin.

Rose Rust's home at 1124 Utah Avenue still stands.

Resources: Sanborn maps, city directories, newspapers of 1916.