Courtney Hotel

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, 1918

The first automobile arrived in Philipsburg sometime around 1910, and the town treated it the way most Montana mining towns treated novelty: with a mixture of suspicion, fascination, and the practical question of who was going to make money from it. The answer, in Philipsburg's case, was Morris and Humphery Courtney, two brothers who had spent the war years pulling manganese out of the ground at a profit that would have seemed improbable to anyone who had watched the silver market collapse in 1893 and assumed the town was finished.

The Courtneys built their hotel in 1918, and they built it for the automobile age with a clarity of purpose that the building still announces. The basement housed the Granite County Garage. The first floor was a dealership and showroom for Overland automobiles, with a wide center door that allowed customers to walk in off South Sansome Street and stand among the cars without getting rained on. The upper two floors held offices and hotel rooms, most of them occupied, in the early years, by schoolteachers who found the arrangement convenient and the rent reasonable.

It is worth pausing on the Overland automobile, because the choice of brand tells you something about the Courtneys' judgment. The Overland was not a luxury vehicle. It was built by the Willys-Overland Company in Toledo, Ohio, and it was priced for the farmer, the rancher, and the small-town businessman who needed reliable transportation over rough roads and could not afford to be stranded when a part failed. By 1918, Willys-Overland was the second-largest automobile manufacturer in the United States, behind only Ford. The company had survived its own near-bankruptcy in 1907 when John North Willys stepped in to rescue it, and by the war years it was producing vehicles at a rate that made Ford nervous. The Courtneys were not selling dreams. They were selling a tool, and they understood their market.

The roads around Philipsburg in 1918 were not designed for automobiles. They were designed for horses, mules, and ore wagons, and they had been designed that way since the 1860s. The grade from Philipsburg down to Drummond was manageable in dry weather and treacherous in wet. The road to Anaconda crossed the Flint Creek Range at an elevation that made early radiators boil. The Overland's reputation for durability on rough terrain was not incidental to the Courtneys' decision to carry that brand. A car that broke down on the way to Anaconda was a car that came back to the dealer on a wagon, and a dealer whose cars kept breaking down did not stay in business long.

The manganese that funded the hotel deserves its own accounting. Manganese is not a glamorous metal. It does not glitter in a pan or inspire men to cross a continent. It is a gray, brittle element used primarily as a hardening agent in steel production, and in peacetime it was imported cheaply from Russia, Brazil, and India. When the war cut off those supplies in 1914, American manufacturers discovered they needed domestic manganese urgently, and they were willing to pay for it. The price per ton rose from roughly three dollars in 1913 to over forty dollars by 1916. Granite County had manganese deposits that had been known since the silver era but ignored because silver paid better. After 1914, those deposits became valuable, and the Courtneys were among the men who recognized the opportunity before the rest of the market caught up.

The timing was characteristic of Philipsburg's economic history. The town had been through this before. Silver was discovered south of here in 1864, and by 1867 the place was growing at the rate of one house per day, according to an area newspaper of that year. Then the Hope Mill shut down and the town emptied. Then silver revived in the 1880s and the masonry buildings went up on Broadway. Then silver collapsed in 1893 and the sapphire deposits cushioned the fall. Then manganese. The Courtneys were not lucky. They were paying attention.

The building they put up reflects the confidence of men who had made their money and intended to keep it. The structure is brick, three stories, with a commercial ground floor and residential upper floors that could be converted to whatever the next decade required. It sits at the intersection of South Sansome and West Stockton, which is to say it sits at the functional center of a town that had learned, through several cycles of boom and contraction, to build things that would still be standing when the next boom arrived.

The schoolteachers who occupied the upper floors in the 1920s and 1930s were a different kind of tenant than the miners and merchants who had filled Philipsburg's hotels during the silver era. They were salaried, stable, and unlikely to disappear overnight when a market collapsed. The school district was the most reliable employer in Granite County during the lean years between the wars, and the Courtneys had built for permanence, which required tenants who were not betting on the price of a commodity.

The Granite County Museum and Cultural Center now occupies the building. The wide center door that once admitted Overland automobiles admits visitors instead. The basement garage is a storage and exhibit space. The hotel rooms are offices. The building has outlasted the Overland automobile company, which was absorbed into what eventually became American Motors and then Chrysler, and it has outlasted the manganese boom that paid for it, and it has outlasted the particular version of Philipsburg that the Courtneys knew. What it has not outlasted is the town itself, which is the point the building was always making.

The Courtney Hotel contributes to the Philipsburg Historic District, listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It is one of sixty-odd structures in that district that were built during the boom years and survived the busts because they were built well enough to survive them. The Courtneys understood that a building is a bet on the future, and they bet correctly.

See also

• Courtney Hotel at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2009)
• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)