612 North Hauser Avenue

By editor

Red Lodge, Carbon County, Montana, October 2024

Paul Lehrkind bought the lot at 612 North Hauser Avenue in 1920 with the intention of building a house. He was the manager of the Red Lodge Brewery, and in 1920 that was still a going concern, though the Eighteenth Amendment had been the law of the land for a year and the Volstead Act had given it teeth. Lehrkind was not a man who gave up easily. He had a plan.

The plan was Bud-O.

Bud-O was a "near beer," which is what the breweries called the malt beverage they were legally permitted to produce during Prohibition, provided the alcohol content stayed below one-half of one percent. The name was optimistic in the way that all near-beer names were optimistic. The Red Lodge Brewery marketed Bud-O under the slogan "Always on Top," which was either a statement of competitive confidence or a reference to the head of foam, depending on how charitable you were feeling. Near beer was legal, and near beer was what the Red Lodge Brewery was going to make, and Paul Lehrkind was going to manage the operation and build his house on Hauser Avenue and everything was going to be fine.

It was not fine. The near-beer business was a difficult one. The problem was not the law but the product. Near beer tasted like what it was, which was beer with the interesting part removed, and the men who had been drinking real beer in the saloons of Red Lodge before Prohibition were not enthusiastic about the substitute. The Rocky Fork mine was still operating in 1920, and the miners who came off shift on a Friday evening wanted something that would take the coal dust out of their throats, and Bud-O was not quite up to the task. By 1921, the Red Lodge Brewery had closed, and Paul Lehrkind had left town.

He sold the lot on Hauser Avenue to Walter Helm before he left. Helm was a butter-maker at the Carbon County Creamery, and he would later become its owner, but in 1921 he was a man with a steady job and a wife named Margaret and a desire to build a house in the Hi Bug neighborhood. He borrowed fifteen hundred dollars from the Carbon Building and Loan Association, which was the standard way of financing a house in Red Lodge in 1921, and he and Margaret built a one-and-a-half-story Craftsman bungalow on the lot that Paul Lehrkind had bought with brewery money and abandoned with near-beer regrets.

The Craftsman style was the dominant residential architecture of the American West in the 1910s and 1920s, and for good reason. It was a philosophy as much as a style, one that had grown out of the Arts and Crafts movement in England and been adapted by California architects into something that suited the American climate and the American budget. The Craftsman designers believed that a house should be honest about its construction, that the structural elements should be visible rather than hidden, and that ornament should grow from function rather than being applied to it. They believed, in the words that the marker quotes, that "beauty does not imply elaboration." They were right, and the house that Walter and Margaret Helm built on Hauser Avenue is evidence for the proposition.

The bungalow at 612 North Hauser Avenue is, the marker says, "one of the best executed examples of the Craftsman style in Red Lodge." This is not a small claim in a neighborhood that has sixty-odd houses built in the same period and the same general style. What distinguishes the Helm house is its careful detailing: the vertical stick work in the main gable, the wide overhanging eaves, the exposed rafter tails, the angled knee braces. The front porch is supported by "battered" square columns, which is the architectural term for columns that taper from a wider base to a narrower top, giving them a solidity that the slender turned columns of the Victorian era lacked. The porch is large and inviting, which is what a Craftsman porch is supposed to be.

Walter Helm made butter at the Carbon County Creamery for many years, and eventually he bought the place, which is the kind of story that Red Lodge told about itself in the years when it was still possible to tell it. The creamery served the ranches and farms of Carbon County, and the butter it produced went to the grocery stores of Billings and the railroad commissaries of the Northern Pacific. Helm was not a dramatic figure. He was a man who showed up every day and did his work and paid his mortgage and kept his house in good repair, and when he died, the house passed to his children, and when they were done with it, it passed to someone else, and it remained in the Helm family until 1971, which is fifty years of one family in one house, which is not nothing.

The lot that Paul Lehrkind bought to build on and never built on, the house that Walter and Margaret Helm built with borrowed money and Craftsman conviction, stands on Hauser Avenue today in the same neighborhood where the McCleary house and the McDonald house and a dozen other houses from the same era still stand. The Red Lodge Hi Bug Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places because these houses, taken together, tell a story about a particular kind of American town in a particular period: a coal town that was also a community, a place where a brewery manager and a butter-maker and a landlady and a real estate agent all lived within a few blocks of each other and built houses that they intended to last. The coal is gone. The brewery is gone. The near beer is certainly gone. The houses remain.

See also

• 612 North Hauser Avenue at Red Lodge, Carbon County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2022)
• Red Lodge Hi Bug Historic District -- National Register of Historic Places listing for the neighborhood
• McCleary House at Red Lodge, Carbon County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2021)