Grace Methodist Episcopal Church

By Richard I. Gibson

939 South Arizona
Built: 1889
Map

The Grace Methodist Episcopal congregation was organized in 1888 to serve South Butte, although a mission in South Butte had begun about 1879. They erected their church on the northwest corner of Arizona and Second Streets in 1889. Montana's second state governor, John Rickards (served 1893-97), was on Grace's initial board of directors. In 1910, membership was 140 under Pastor W.H. Pascoe, who lived at the church.

Over time, the address scheme changed here, from the 200 block of Arizona when it referred to the separate community of South Butte, to 945 and 939 South Arizona after the address became part of the Butte grid. The original 1889 church was significantly expanded and modified in 1902, including the addition of the corner spire.

Reformer Carrie Nation spoke here during her Butte visit in January 1910. Grace was one of the churches where Mrs. Nation did “a land-office business” selling her books and hatchet pins, although when she was on the streets of Butte and in saloons, her welcome was more ridicule than enthusiasm. After her lecture at the Grace Church, she marched up Arizona Street to the red-light district where she pleaded with working girls to give up their “life of shame,” but she left the A.B.C. Saloon (corner of Wyoming and Mercury) to the orchestra playing “What The Hell Do We Care.”

In 2013, the church is vacant and privately owned, with restoration in the offing.

Resources: Anaconda Standard and Butte Miner, January 26-29, 1910; Sanborn Maps; City Directories; Methodism on the Richest Hill on Earth, by Mike Parr. Photo by Richard Gibson.

The Cabbage Patch

By Richard I. Gibson

108½ South Arizona
Built: pre-1891
Map

These shacks and outbuildings were at the extreme north end of the shanty town that grew up in the 1880s on the near southeast side of Butte’s main business district. The “Patch” was home to bootleggers, drunks, prostitutes, poor families, newly arrived immigrants, widows with children, criminals, and other down-on-their luck residents.

Construction is truly vernacular, using available materials, scavenged or stolen from waste piles, mine yards, and elsewhere. In 1916, the Cabbage Patch extended approximately from Arizona Street on the west to Oklahoma St. on the east, and from Galena (and its extension) on the north to Platinum or Porphyry on the south. Most of the buildings – more than 200 – were razed in 1940-41 to make way for Silver Bow Homes, the ranks of low-income apartments that still stand south of Mercury Street. At about the same time, the buildings here were converted to garages, with addition of flooring and large garage doors.

When used as residences, these places had dirt floors, and no electricity, running water, or sewer systems. Important original elements include scraps of linoleum and loose fabric used as wallpaper and insulation, and pressed tin and wood timber walls. The name reflects the frequent use of cabbage in meals—that smell, combined with that of the open sewer that wound its way through the district, contributed to the seedy feel of the neighborhood.

The surviving buildings of the Cabbage Patch are part of a tour with Old Butte Historical Adventures.

Modified slightly from original publication in Vernacular Architecture Forum, Butte Conference Guidebook, 2009, p. 102-103, by Richard Gibson. Additional resource: Butte Voices, by Pat Kearney, Skyhigh Communications, 1998. Photos by Richard Gibson.

Tony’s Tin Shop & Myra Brothel, 108 S. Arizona

By Richard I. Gibson

Built: c. 1914- c. 1925
Status: Vacant, used as museum for historic tours
Map

The oldest section of this building is the front 12 feet of the first floor, built as Tony’s Tin Shop in 1914-15. The shop grew to the east in at least two additions before 1920, when the second floor was added as a small boarding house. By 1925, the upper floor was rented to a couple who lived in the eastern extension of the second floor and who operated the front portion as a brothel according to family history. The family – Tony and Mary (Myra) Cononica, lived in the add-on section east of the first-floor tin shop.

Original elements of the building are preserved because it remains in the same family; the tin shop has never served any other role. The boarding house/brothel upstairs is relatively small, and would have been a fairly upscale brothel, falling somewhere between the high-class parlor houses and low-end shacks called cribs.

Tours of this building are available from Old Butte Historical Adventures.

Photo by Richard Gibson.