833 W. Quartz (Soroptimist House)

Built: c. 1895
Architect: H.M. Patterson
Map

Butte architect H. M. Patterson designed this brick home for attorney John Colter in the 1890s. Semicircular windows in the gables, stone lintels, a prominent portico supported by Tuscan columns, and an inviting front porch ornament the residence. Henry Muntzer, founder of the Butte Brewery, purchased the property in 1901 for his wife Mary and their eight children. Family members lived here into the 1940s, adding the east-side addition before 1916.

Butte’s Soroptimist Club purchased the residence in 1947 for $5,500. The charitable women’s organization campaigned tirelessly for funds to transform the house into a temporary “receiving home for dependent, neglected, abused, or abandoned children.” With volunteer help from Butte union members, the Soroptimists added four new rooms to the rear of the building, repaired the porches, updated the wiring, installed fire escapes, added a third bathroom, carpeted the floors, and built a playground. In its first ten years of operation, the home cared for over 1,700 children. After the Soroptimists moved in 1970, the residence fell into disrepair. It was rescued by Steve and Janet Hadnagy, who spent years restoring it to a single-family home.

Text from Historic Plaque by Montana Historical Society (Martha Kohl). Photo by Richard I. Gibson (Anselmo mine in right background). For more information about the Soroptimist House, see Motherlode, by Janet L. Finn and Ellen Crain (2005).

65 East Broadway (Thornton Block)

Built: 1901
Map

Beautifully detailed and thoroughly cosmopolitan, this $75,000 five-story hotel opened May 5, 1901 featuring over one hundred rooms, a saloon, restaurant, barber shop, and bowling alley. A cast-iron and glass entrance canopy, stone balconies, Tudor arches, and decorative carving highlight the elegant exterior. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century hotel patrons, no doubt impressed with Butte’s metropolitan character, could even take an electric street railway direct to Sutton’s Broadway Theater. After 1947, the Thornton Block served for many years as a club for Anaconda Copper Mining Company employees. In 2013, this office building also houses Montana’s supercomputer in the basement, where the heat generated by the electronic equipment provides significant energy savings, making this one of the greenest historic buildings in the state.

In 1914, room 207 in the Thornton was the Headquarters Office of the Montana Equal Suffrage Association, with Jeanette Rankin as Chairman. (See the Women's History Tour on HistoryPin.)


President Theodore Roosevelt attended a banquet here in 1903, and Booker T. Washington stayed here in 1913.

Text modified from historic plaque by Montana Historical Society. See also Historic Uptown Butte, by John DeHaas, 1977, p. 52-53 (error in reporting Roosevelt’s visit as 1908; it was 1903). Photo by Richard Gibson.

123-125 North Main Street

123 North Main Street
Built: pre-1884
Architect: Henry Patterson (1895 modification)
Map

Cast-iron pilasters, a metal cornice, interior hardwood paneling and a pressed metal ceiling are reminders of the varied remodelings of this early commercial building, constructed before 1884. The saloon and billiard parlor that occupied the first floor here in the 1880s and early 1890s was the uptown outlet for the Centennial Brewing Company, largest in Butte. The brewery was located along Silver Bow Creek, west of where Montana Street crosses it today.

In 1895, architect H. M. Patterson remodeled the building for $5,000, adding a cast-iron storefront. By 1910, Clerke’s Clothing Store occupied both this building and the one next door. Store president Samuel Clerke installed the metal cornice joining the two buildings. During the 1930s at this address Butte’s immensely popular Spokane Cafe served a sizable clientele. The building’s most significant use, however, occurred in 1905. During that year the Woman’s Protective Union (W.P.U.), predecessor of today’s Hotel and Restaurant Employees International Union and the nation’s first union for women, met upstairs. This pivotal organization was founded in Butte in 1893 so that women would not “…be behind their brothers in demanding their rights.”

125 North Main Street
Built: pre-1884
Architect: Henry Patterson (1895 modification)

Like its immediate neighbors, this is one of Butte’s earliest substantial buildings. Dating before 1884, it documents various periods of use through a distinct sequence of visible alterations. The ground floor commercial space was originally occupied by a jeweler and a tailor. Furnished rooms were available at the back and upstairs, accessed by an interior stairway. The upper windows with their graceful brick arches are typical of this earliest period. A dry goods/notions and millinery shop next shared the commercial storefront.

Butte architect H. M. Patterson designed a new façade in 1895, connecting this address with the building to the south. The cast-iron pilasters of that remodeling remain visible next door. In 1900, an inner doorway opened into J. V. Harmon’s saloon at 123 North Main. Clothing store owner Samuel Clerke installed the metal cornice in 1910, further linking numbers 123 and 125. By 1930, Hoenck’s Fur Shop occupied this building, once again separating the two addresses. Art Deco style metal sheathing, added circa 1940 and since removed, further chronicled the building’s alterations as its function changed over time.

Like other buildings in this block, the backs of these two were damaged by a major fire in 1889, and the buildings were declared total losses, but they actually survived. This block, excluding the north and south corners, is among the oldest intact sections of the Butte business district.

Modified from historic plaques by Montana Historical Society. Photo by Richard Gibson.