Henry Jacobs House

By Richard I. Gibson

201 W. Granite
Built: 1879
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Henry Jacobs (1835-87), Butte’s first mayor (1879-80), was a native of Baden, Germany. He immigrated to America’s south at the age of nine, and fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War—he was at the siege of Vicksburg in 1863. He came to Montana in 1866, establishing his first clothing store in Diamond City, a gold-rush town in the Little Belt Mountains on Confederate Gulch north of Townsend. He located in Deer Lodge in 1869, and eventually moved to Butte in 1876 where he established the H. Jacobs and Company clothing store, located by the mid-1880s in the new Lizzie Block, corner of Park and Main (Party Palace today). After 1879, Jacobs was in partnership in his business with Herman Ganz of Helena.

Jacobs and his wife, Adele (1839-1928), completed this charming home circa 1879. It was one of Butte’s early all brick residences, although today the brick is covered by stucco. The wrap-around porch is an early, if not original element of the house; it was present in 1884. Mr. Jacobs served as a school trustee, an officer of the I.O.O.F., and president of the Hebrew Benevolent Association. Both Adele and Henry Jacobs are buried in Butte’s B’nai Israel Cemetery, although Adele appears to have left Butte by about 1900.

In 2013, the property was owned by the city and county of Butte-Silver Bow, which rents it to non-profit organizations for office space.

Resources: Historical plaque by Montana Historical Society; A History of Montana, 1739-1885: A History of Its Discovery and Settlement, by Michael A. Leeson, 1885; photo of Jacobs published in Montana Standard Diamond Jubilee edition, June 13, 1954. Photo of house by Richard Gibson.

327 West Galena Street (B'nai Israel Temple)

Built: 1903-04
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Butte’s ethnic diversity is well represented in this beautiful synagogue, dedicated February 26, 1904. The Butte Jewish community dates to 1875, and Butte’s first mayor, Henry Jacobs, was Jewish. Jacobs immigrated to the U.S. from Germany in the 1850s, fought for the South in the Civil War, made his way north in the 1860s, and was elected mayor in 1879.

After the Jewish community split into one reform and two orthodox groups, this temple was built for use by the reform congregation; the orthodox congregations continued for a few years but were ultimately disbanded. The three-story masonry building features a corner bell tower with an onion dome roof, an ornately corbelled front gable with rosette window beneath, and semicircular brick arches. This is the oldest synagogue in Montana still in use as a synagogue (the one in Helena is slightly older, but no longer serves as a house of worship) and this is one of only a few synagogues in the United States still in use that has the Moorish (onion-dome) architecture. Prior to its construction in 1903-04, the group worshiped in the Carpenter’s Union Hall and at the Mountain View Methodist Church.

The land was provided to the Jewish community in 1885 by the Northern Pacific Railway. Stained glass windows commemorate Elias and Mina Oppenheimer, German immigrants whose sons Joseph and Henry were partners with George Symons in Symons’ Dry Goods, a store that eventually became one of Butte’s most important department stores.

Resources: Historic plaque by Montana Historical Society; Congregation B’nai Israel Temple, by Richard Gibson, in Historic Stained Glass in selected houses of worship, Butte, Montana, published by Butte Citizens for Preservation and Revitalization, 2006. Photos by Richard Gibson.