New Year’s Day 1899

By Richard I. Gibson

The Anaconda Standard’s full-page article covering the year 1898 in review focused on “The Changing Map of the World” – appropriate in the wake of the Spanish-American War, colonial imperialism in Africa, and the “spoliation of China” through the establishment of European treaty ports. Willis Abbott, who wrote the article specially for the Standard, boasted of the triumph of democracy in Cuba as a result of the war, and the freeing of Crete from “Turkish misrule,” even as parts of Europe – Italy and Spain, especially, underwent bread riots and famine.

The scientific news of the year was a device invented by Polish electrician Jan Szezepanik (the "Austrian Edison") that promised to revolutionize telegraphy by transmitting images by means of oscillating mirrors. In literature, Abbott reported “Many Books; None Great.”

“The struggle between man’s worse and better nature had its striking exemplifications in 1898, as it will have no doubt in all years to come.”

Butte’s burgeoning economy was reflected in the advertisements of January 1, 1899. Gans & Klein’s Men’s Clothing Store was at 120-122 North Main (still standing), while Ley’s Jewelers was in the 8-year-old Owsley Block at Park and Main. Walsh & Craft, brokers and wholesalers for all sorts of merchandise including 6,000 cases of California canned goods, had their office at 71 West Park Street.

Sources: Anaconda Standard, January 1, 1899; city directories. Jan Szezepanik on Wikipedia.

Butte Public Bath House

By Richard I. Gibson

In 1884, the northwest corner of Arizona and Granite was occupied by the channel of the stream that curved south out of Dublin Gulch, behind the Butte Brewery and on eventually to Silver Bow Creek. Arizona Street existed in concept, but north of Broadway it was undefined.

By 1888, the “stream” was little more than a ditch, labeled “open sewer,” and a berm along its eastern side held a dirt path that crossed the northwest corner of the Granite-Arizona intersection. The Public School (later Washington Jr. High) was a half-block to the east. In 1900, the ditch was gone, pretty much covered over, but there was nothing around that corner other than some small tenements on the east side of Arizona north of Granite.

About 1905-06, the first and probably only building to stand on the northwest corner was erected. It was built as a gymnasium and natatorium (swimming pool). The address was 125 E. Granite. The Butte Brewery was just off to the northwest; the Dorothy Apartments were down Granite at Wyoming, New homes were popping up on Granite and Quartz east of Arizona. The photo above is probably from about 1911, but it could be as early as 1907. You can see the tall towers of the Butte Brewery at left center, and the hoist house in the right background is the Washoe Mine, which had closed down before 1900.

I’m not certain who had the building built – was it truly “public baths,” as indicated in the photo caption? Or was it a place where the public could use the water supply? The “plunge,” which I take to mean the swimming pool, was 20 feet by 50 feet. It’s not clear where in the building it was located, but by about 1910, the second floor held a gymnasium and the plunge was “not used.”

300 block of North Main in 1942. Photo by John Vachon.
(FSA photo from Library of Congress)

In October 1910 the gymnasium was taken over by Prof. Jerry McCarthy for the Olympic Athletic Club. The club had been meeting at 307 North Main, today the parking lot east of the Archives. 307 North Main became the long-time home of National Market.

Jerry McCarthy, who lived at 614 West Park, made a living running the Athletic Club and teaching amateur sports like boxing. When the club moved into the new gym at Granite and Arizona in 1910, doubling the size of the space available, 400 club members turned out for the grand opening on October 18. McCarthy’s pupils Young Mooney and Kid Forbes were matched in a lightweight boxing exhibition, as were Tally Johns (a miner at the Minnie Healey) and Harry Graves. Both bouts ended in a draw. The headliners in the boxing show were Maurice Thompson vs. Jack Clark from Calgary, but that was yet another draw, as determined by referee McCarthy.

Butte’s champion wrestler Tim Harrington defeated challenger Davey two falls to one. McCarthy himself put on a show of bag-punching and displayed to the “audience what good rope skipping really is.”

By 1916, this building had been taken over by the Y.M.A. Club – the Young Men’s Association. The Y.M.A. started a successful lyceum course here. Lyceums were educational courses aimed mainly at adults, with programs of lectures, entertainments, debates, and classes.

The lyceum movement in America peaked in the late 19th century but was still active well into the 1920s. The Butte lyceum, led by one Tom Davis and the Y.M.A., became one of the most successful lyceum programs in America in 1916, even though they started in the building at 125 East Granite, “the most pathetic appeal for an association building I ever saw,” as reported by The Lyceum Magazine. The young men were joined by Guy Lewis, a Lutey’s West Store manager, who helped with organization. They had their own Butte newspaper, the Association Herald, “A Community Builder, For a Better Butte.”

Y.M.A. members were paid a 10% commission on ticket sales (tickets cost 25¢ - or season tickets for 8 shows at $2.00) as an incentive – and it apparently worked. Even The Lyceum Magazine was surprised that they managed to pack the 1100-seat Broadway theater in Butte with an audience who paid to hear a lecture. Their entire program series in October 1917 had receipts of $3200. The first program brought the nationally-known Oxford Company to Butte. They put on a performance of light opera, drama, and singing.

In 1917, the Y.M.A. merged with the Y.M.C.A. I do not know when the gymnasium building was lost, but it was before 1928. The corner has been a vacant lot or parking lot since then.

The photo below shows this corner about 1900 (from, A Brief History of Butte, by Harry Freeman, 1901), annotated to indicate streets, the Dorothy Block at Granite and Wyoming, and the red circle is the corner in this post, Arizona and Granite, a vacant lot in 1900.

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Sources:

The Oxford Company photo from University of Iowa

Butte YMA newspaper and advertisements from The Lyceum Magazine, October 1916

Photo of 125 E. Granite (“Public Baths”) from Annual Reports of the City Officers, City of Butte, fiscal years 1906-1911, digitized by Butte Public Library.

Additional information from Sanborn Maps, City Directories.

Merry Christmas, 1902

Anaconda Standard, Christmas 1902. Art work by Thorndike.

Santy—"Gee Whiz! What can I give you that you haven't got?" Celebrating a bountiful year.

Better English

Lower photo is at Park and Main looking west on Park. Yegen Brothers Bank (Clark Hotel) in middle distance;
American Theater at middle right; Metals Bank at left.

By Richard I. Gibson

In November 1919 students from Butte High took to the streets. It wasn’t Homecoming, it wasn’t a protest march, it wasn’t even the first anniversary of Armistice Day yet. It was a parade – actually two parades – marking the successful end to Better English Week.

Butte High at Park & Idaho

In passing they also boasted that they would “grind up” Great Falls in the football game that Saturday, but the entire student body – 1,000 students – took part in a march from the high school (then at Park and Idaho) down Park to Main, up to Broadway, and west on Broadway back to the school. In the photo above (by photographer Clara Schoettner, whose studio was at 37½ N. Main) the Butte High School banner, lettered in purple, is carried by the four class presidents, Charles Stone, Bob Southcomb, Walter Adams, and Charles Gavin. The drummer is Dave Rosenberg. The second parade was a little more of a send-off for the team as they boarded the train for Great Falls, but the enthusiasm there “literally took the lid off Butte.”

As part of Better English Week students also performed a play, “Nevertheless,” written by student Stuart Walser and starring Lucille Staebler, Salome Torrence, Fred Sutherland, and John Egan. 

A second play, performed by the junior class, was a parody of “Red Riding Hood” written by teacher Miss Ella Spafford, who lived at 1419 West Granite. Leonard Renick, son of Dr. William Renick (727 W. Park Street), played Red Riding Hood.

The Better English campaign began as an effort to correct grammatical errors in speech, but before it was over, it had expanded to include “enunciation, moderation of the voice, giggling, gum chewing, spelling, punctuation, and manners.” There was evidently considerable semi-serious banter between teachers and students. Teachers who claimed students used “inelegant English” were pilloried by students who accused them of giggling, smirking, and “trying to be smart.”

Students interviewed businessmen across Butte, some of whom claimed they would not employ clerks who used slang and some attributed their success to “correct use of English.” Newsmen told the students that teachers were among the worst offenders for submitting manuscripts with every noun capitalized. They blamed it on study of German.

The campaign included street car advertising, posters created by the Butte High art department, printed articles, and speeches. The Standard reported that “such words and expressions as ‘ain’t,’ ‘swell,’ ‘ain’t he a dear,’ ‘now, ain’t that just too lovely for anything,’ are doomed.”

Sources: Anaconda Standard, Nov. 8, Nov. 9, 1919; City Directories; Sanborn Maps. Post card view of Butte High from Gibson's collection.

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. 

Chimney-sweeping time in Butte

By Richard I. Gibson

“It has been noticeable that there is a great rush to have the chimneys of the houses swept and thoroughly cleansed for the accommodation and comfort of the ever-welcome Santa.” Anaconda Standard, December 21, 1902.

One of Santa’s “best and most faithful allies” in Butte was Elias Simmington, the “colored chimney sweep who has served Santa well for many Christmases.” Simmington grew up in Kansas and arrived in Butte about 1882. For more than 20 years, he made a point of sweeping chimneys of “good little girls and boys” in the season approaching Christmas. 

In 1902, Simmington’s promotion of Santa, assuring the children of Santa’s impending safe arrival, opined that since the previous year, Santa had taken to “new fandangled ideas,” and had gotten himself a peach of an automobile. The reindeer, getting a bit old and slow, were to be given a break for Christmas 1902 as Santa tested the new contraption.

In Simmington’s view, Santa liked Butte almost well enough to live here permanently, but the smoke was what kept him from doing it. And Santa’s aversion to smoke was Simmington’s incentive to keep the chimneys clean. In the performance of his job, he was sometimes mistaken for Santa himself. A little girl was certain Santa had arrived, but her brother, who Simmington said was “pretty well posted on everything,” told her, “Naw, that ain’t Santa Claus. Santa Claus has got white whiskers, and that man ain’t.”

Elias Simmington lived at 203 South Ohio Street just south of the intersection of Ohio and Mercury, in the Cabbage Patch. His tenement was a 10-by-20-foot brick veneered room, one of a short row of such homes on the west side of Ohio Street. He died before 1910, when his widow, Babe Elizabeth, was working as a janitor at Symons Department Store on Park Street and living at 1037 Iowa Avenue. She was still in that job and home in 1918. The little one-story house on Iowa Street is gone today, but the lot is a nicely landscaped yard.

On the same 1902 newspaper page as the article about Elias Simmington, another story reported on one Charles Whalen, immigrant to Butte from Baltimore. He came to Butte on the advice of his physician, to get over consumption. He claimed that Butte’s sulphur smoke contained a germicide that killed the consumption germ. “Arsenic in the smoke builds up the system,” Whalen said, “and there you are.” He said he was thinking about building a sanitarium in Butte for the curing of consumption through the breathing of its smoky atmosphere.

Resources: Anaconda Standard, December 21, 1902; Butte Miner, Dec. 21, 1902; city directories; Sanborn maps.

Velie Motors

By Richard I. Gibson

A new car for Christmas? In 1919, Velie Motors of Butte, at 404 S. Arizona, had what you wanted, if you could afford it.

The Velie Carriage Company of Moline, Illinois, was established in 1902 by Willard Velie, grandson of John Deere. In 1908, the company became the Velie Motor Vehicle Company, and it made cars until 1928. Velie was a mid-priced auto, at around $1,800 compared to the Ford Model T, which cost $345 to $525 in the middle 1910s, and the American Motor Car Company (not the same as the later American Motors) “American” at $3000 in 1906. The Velie could do 70 miles per hours, according to the caption in the photo above. 

Velie’s peak production year was 1920, when they made about 9000 vehicles; they averaged about 5,000 cars a year. Both the founder and his son died, in October 1928 and March 1929, respectively, and the company was out of business. Today, only 230 Velies are known to exist. 

The Velie dealer in Butte in 1919 was Northwestern Motor Sales Co. at 404-406 South Arizona, on the east side of the street just below the corner of Porphyry. Their garage had a 26-car capacity and their steam heat was generated by their own boiler. Today, this intersection does not exist; Porphyry Street and the site of Northwestern Motor Sales are part of Silver Bow Homes. 

Northwestern Motor’s manager in 1918 was Isaac Wheeler, who lived at 316 N. Excelsior. He was also an insurance agent with an office at 209 West Park Street.

In 1918 Butte had 28 businesses listed under “Automobile manufacturers, dealers and repairers.” Probably at least 10 of them were auto dealers as we’d think of it today; some were agents who probably took orders rather than having a real showroom.

Charles T. Jennings, the photographer who made the photo above, worked for the B.E. Calkins Company, dealers in office supplies and picture frames at Broadway and Main, southeast corner; Benjamin E. Calkins lived in room 503 at the Mueller Apartments. Jennings lived at 522 Franklin Street, a house that is still standing – I can see it out my north window as I type this.

Resources: Anaconda Standard, March 23, 1919; Sanborn maps; city directories; online information about Velie Motor Vehicle Company.