Conrad Mansion

By editor

Kalispell, Flathead County, Montana, 1895

Charles Conrad arrived in Fort Benton in 1868 with nothing. He was eighteen years old, a Virginia boy from the Shenandoah Valley, the seventh of thirteen children, and the Civil War had left the family with a plantation name and not much else. He walked into the offices of I.G. Baker and Brother, the largest mercantile firm in Montana Territory, and asked for a job as a clerk. They gave him one. Within eight years, he and his brother William owned the company.

The I.G. Baker firm was not a modest enterprise. By the early 1870s, it was handling more than 4,800 tons of freight annually, running steamboats up the Missouri River and ox-drawn wagon trains across the plains, supplying the Canadian Northwest Mounted Police, the U.S. Army, and every trading post and mining camp within reach of the upper Missouri. Conrad ran the Fort Benton end of the operation with the energy of a man who had arrived with nothing and intended to leave with considerably more. He learned the freight business from the river up: how to read the Missouri's moods, how to negotiate with the Blackfeet whose territory the wagon trains crossed, how to price a bolt of calico against the cost of getting it to a place where calico was scarce.

He also learned something that the freight business teaches quickly: that the men who supply a boom make more money than the men who work it. The gold miners of the 1860s and 1870s were Conrad's customers, not his competition. When the gold ran out, the miners moved on. Conrad stayed.

By the 1880s, the Conrad brothers had diversified into banking in Fort Benton and Great Falls, cattle ranching, timberlands, and real estate. They were, by any measure, among the wealthiest men in northern Montana. And then, in 1891, Charles Conrad did something that surprised people who thought they understood him. He sold his river freighting interests to the Hudson's Bay Company and moved to the Flathead Valley.

The reason was the railroad. James J. Hill's Great Northern Railway was pushing west across Montana, and Conrad had learned enough about the freight business to know that the steamboat era on the Missouri was ending. The railroad would carry what the river had carried, faster and cheaper. The men who positioned themselves at the railroad's division points would do what the men at the river landings had done before them. Conrad bought land in the Flathead Valley, platted a townsite, and named it Kalispell. He did this quietly, through a front man, buying 160 acres from farmers who did not know they were selling to the man who was about to make their land worth ten times what they had accepted for it. This was not unusual in 1891. It was how towns were made.

Kalispell grew quickly. Conrad founded the Conrad National Bank in 1892. He built a hotel, a flour mill, and various other enterprises that a new town required. He was, in the phrase of the time, a booster, though his boosting was backed by capital rather than rhetoric. And in 1895, he commissioned the house.

He hired Kirtland Cutter of Spokane, Washington, who was then the most fashionable architect in the Pacific Northwest. Cutter designed a 26-room Norman Revival mansion on a hill above the town, with a wraparound porch, a carriage house, and grounds that were intended to suggest that the man who lived there had been wealthy long enough to take it for granted. The house cost somewhere between $12,000 and $15,000, which was a considerable sum in 1895 and a modest one given what Conrad was worth. He moved in with his wife Lettie and their three children.

James Murphy, who knew the family, wrote later that "the Conrads truly welcomed their guests. Both had a great appreciation for their home and the surrounding area and were filled with a strong desire to share these things with their friends and guests. Sharing seemed to be their greatest pleasure and the greater the number of guests, the more pleasure it gave the Conrads." This is the kind of thing people say about the wealthy when the wealthy are also genuinely generous, which Conrad appears to have been.

He had, by 1895, a complicated family. His first wife had been a Blackfeet woman named Sings-in-the-Middle, with whom he had a son, Charles Edward Conrad Jr., born in 1876. After Sings-in-the-Middle died, Conrad sent the boy to boarding school in Montreal and married Lettie Davenport Stanford in 1881. Charles Jr. grew up in Canada, corresponded with his father's family in Montana, and died at twenty-eight. The three children he had with Lettie -- Charley Davenport, Catherine, and Alicia -- grew up in the mansion on the hill.

Conrad died in November 1902, at fifty-two, of diabetes and tuberculosis. He had been in Montana for thirty-four years and had built, from a clerk's position in a river freight office, one of the largest commercial enterprises in the northern Rockies. He had also, in 1901, done something that had nothing to do with commerce: he bought twenty-eight purebred bison from the Allard herd on the Blackfeet Reservation and established a buffalo herd on his land outside Kalispell. It was an early conservation gesture, and it outlasted him. After his death, Lettie sold thirty-four head to the American Bison Society, and those animals became the nucleus of the National Bison Range near Moiese, Montana, which still exists.

The mansion passed to Lettie, who lived in it until her death in 1923. The youngest daughter, Alicia, stayed on. She managed the house through the Depression and the war and the postwar years, watching Kalispell grow up around the hill where her father had built his statement of arrival. In 1974, at the age of eighty-two, she donated the mansion to the city.

It has been a museum since then. The 26 rooms are largely unchanged from 1895. The light fixtures are original. The carriage house is still standing. The grounds are still the grounds that Kirtland Cutter designed for a man who had arrived in Fort Benton with nothing and intended to leave a mark.

He left one.

See also

• Conrad Mansion at Kalispell, Flathead County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2016)
• Houtz House at Kalispell, Flathead County -- George Houtz and the founding of Kalispell's newspaper culture