803 West Granite

Built: 1901
Map 

Prominently situated on a corner lot, this Queen Anne style residence is a neighborhood showpiece. Band leader Sam Treloar had the brick-veneered house constructed in 1901, possibly as an investment property. The Cornish bandmaster is best known as the leader of the Butte Mines Band, which he founded under a different name in 1887 and led for over fifty years. It was one of the United States’ most celebrated industrial bands, and its members, all miners, won first place in competitions across the West.

The two-story residence features an octagonal turret with wide overhanging eaves and a fixed stained glass window, an inviting front porch with double Tuscan column porch supports, and a projecting bay on the east façade. Banker Rupert Nuckolls lived here from 1908 through 1912 with his wife Georgia, their three children, and (after their eldest daughter married), their son-in-law and granddaughter. Georgia Nuckolls was an active clubwoman. Starting in the 1890s, the woman’s club movement provided its members social and intellectual opportunities (Nuckolls, for example was active in the Westside Shakespeare Club) as well as advocating for political reform.

Text from Historic Plaque by Montana Historical Society. Photo by Richard I. Gibson.

314 West Park (Masonic Temple)

Built: 1901-02
Map 

Facade detail

The first Masonic Lodge in Butte was chartered October 3, 1876. With a membership of 550 after the turn of the twentieth century, the organization had outgrown its old quarters on West Park. The new temple, completed in 1902, provides an early example of the grandly scaled Beaux-Arts style that came to dominate Butte’s later civic structures. Link and Carter, the forerunner of the prestigious architectural firm of Link and Haire, created the new temple, enhancing its façade with Ionic columns, a cornice of lions’ heads, and decorative borders of acanthus leaves and geometric designs.

Resources: Historical plaque by Montana Historical Society. Photo by Richard I. Gibson.

5 North Excelsior (Gillies/Parent House)

Built: 1901
Map

This showcase Queen Anne style home adds ambiance to one of Butte’s most prominent blocks. An elegant brick arch, flared overhangs accentuated with wooden brackets, projecting oriel windows, a centered Palladian window, and an extended gable decoration visually complicate the front facade. Constructed in 1901, it was home to Bettie Boyce and her husband, mining engineer Donald Gillies, who served as superintendent and ultimately manager of the W. A. Clark properties. In 1923, the Gillies’ daughter Lynnie married Horace Siegel, manager of Siegel Clothing. The Butte Miner described the wedding, which included a reception at the home, as one of the most notable ever in Butte. The Gillies and Siegels owned the house until 1928 when they sold it to Thomas and Esther Parent. Thomas worked as a salesman for the Symons Department Store, whose owner built the mansion next door. In 1932 the Parent family waved from the front yard as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s motorcade passed by. Their son Thomas Jr. and his wife Mildred raised four children in the home, and it continues to remain in the Parent family as of 2012.

Resources: Historical plaque by Montana Historical Society. Photo by Richard I. Gibson.

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.

Shaffer Chapel

By Richard I. Gibson

Built 1901
602 S. Idaho at Platinum
Map

Shaffer Chapel was reportedly a gift to the African-American community from W.A. Clark. It was the second home to the African Methodist Episcopal congregation in Butte. That group built its first church at Idaho and Mercury (where the fire station is today) in 1892, but after they moved to Shaffer Chapel, the original building became home to the Baptist Bethel Church which also served African-Americans.

The building was vacant in 1951 but in recent years has been used as a day care center and as a church.

See also this Butte History blog post on Booker T. Washington.

Photo by Richard Gibson

Hirbour Tower, 102 N. Main

By Richard I. Gibson
           
Built: 1901
Map

Research indicates that this eight-story building is the second skyscraper (steel girder construction) west of Minneapolis and St. Louis (the first is the Call Building in San Francisco, erected in 1898). The building measures 58 by 28 feet and is about 90 feet tall. The basement, accessed through the public stairwell into the vaulted sidewalk, was the best-preserved sub-sidewalk storefront in Butte. Vaulted sidewalks were supported by brick or granite walls and floored with dirt or planks and contained grids of glass prisms to focus light into the vaults (a few survive on the South side of West Broadway Street near the Leggatt Hotel). The space here, restored to the 1928-69 Hirbour Barber Shop, was initially home to the Salvation Army, followed by a courier company (c. 1905-1928). The “secret” back room provided access to the rest of the building and was used as a private drinking establishment for the barber’s customers as recently as the 1950s; it was probably established during Prohibition at about the time the barber shop opened in 1928. The restored barber shop was removed in 2015 to make way for renovation of the basement for other uses.

Looking east on Broadway.

The tower contains a cast-iron staircase as well as cast iron window casements on the ground floor. Emanuel Hirbour, who died before his building was finished, is memorialized in the terra cotta “H” emblems on the street-level façade. Although the two-story buildings to the north were present when the Hirbour was built, the north wall of the tower is essentially windowless, presumably in anticipation of later high-rise construction there. At least three different advertising signs occupied that wall over time, but all are faded to invisibility today. As was typical in Butte, the first floor was devoted to retail and the upper floors were offices.

In 2012-13, the building was renovated to create condominiums on each of the upper floors.

Photos by Richard Gibson.