C.T. Huffman Grocery

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, September 2025

The building at the corner of Broadway and Sansome was built around 1887, which was the year Philipsburg decided it was going to be a real town rather than a mining camp with ambitions. The Granite Mountain Mine was producing silver at a rate that justified permanent construction, and the merchants who had come to serve the mine were putting up brick buildings because brick buildings said something that wooden ones did not. What they said, roughly, was: we are staying.

The first tenants were Lutey's Grocery on one side and the Barrett and Jacky Harness Shop on the other, which tells you something about the economy of a mining town in 1887. A harness shop was not a luxury; it was infrastructure. The mules and horses that hauled ore out of the Granite Mountain Mine and supplies up the mountain needed harnesses, and harnesses needed repair, and Valentine Jacky was the man who did that work. He shared the building with C.T. Huffman, who supplied groceries to Philipsburg and to the town of Granite on the mountain above, which had three thousand people and no grocery store of its own.

The logistics of supplying Granite from Philipsburg were not simple. The town of Granite sat at 7,200 feet on the mountain above, accessible by a road that was steep enough to test any wagon team and impassable in winter without considerable effort. The Huffmans ran wagons up the mountain during the warmer months, carrying flour and salt pork and dried beans and canned goods, and they arranged for pack animals when the road was too bad for wagons. This was not a casual operation; it required planning and capital and a reliable relationship with the mine operators, who were the Huffmans' largest single customer.

C.T. Huffman and his partner A.S. Huffman eventually expanded into both sides of the building, which is the natural trajectory of a grocery store that is feeding a mining camp at its peak. The Huffmans were not just selling flour and sugar; they were selling everything that three thousand people on a mountain needed to eat, which is a considerable volume of goods. The Granite Mountain Mine was producing between $250,000 and $275,000 worth of silver per month in 1889, and the miners who dug it out needed to eat three times a day.

Then came 1893. Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the price of silver collapsed, and the Granite Mountain Mine closed. The three thousand people on the mountain left in a single day. Valentine Jacky's harness shop lost most of its customers overnight. C.T. Huffman's grocery lost the Granite trade entirely, which was a significant portion of the business. The town of Philipsburg, which had been a supply hub for a mountain full of miners, became a county seat in a ranching valley, which is a different kind of economy and a slower one.

The Huffman family adapted. A.S. Huffman's sons took over the grocery and ran it through the lean years of the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, serving the ranchers and their families who had replaced the miners as the primary customers. The transition from mining economy to ranching economy was not simply a matter of changing the inventory, though it required that too. A grocery store that served miners stocked different things than a grocery store that served ranchers: less salt pork and more fresh beef, less canned goods and more bulk grain, less of everything that could be carried up a mountain on a pack animal and more of everything that could be grown in the Flint Creek Valley. The Huffmans made the adjustment, which is why they were still in business in the 1970s. The store became a fixture of Philipsburg in the way that only a family business can become a fixture: not because it was the best grocery store anyone had ever seen, but because it was always there, and the family that ran it was always there, and in a town that had lost most of its population in a single day, that kind of continuity was worth something.

The Huffman grocery eventually became the oldest family-owned grocery store in Montana, which is a distinction that requires a certain stubbornness to achieve. The state has had a great many grocery stores over the years, and most of them have been sold or consolidated or simply closed when the family that ran them ran out of family. The Huffmans ran out of neither, and the store on Broadway kept going until the 1970s, when A.S. Huffman's sons finally closed it.

The building itself survived. In 1992 and 1993, the owner Dale Siegford and a woodwright named Barry Carnahan undertook a meticulous reconstruction of the 1890s facade and a restoration of the tin-ceilinged interior, which is the kind of project that requires both money and conviction. The tin ceiling had been there since the 1880s, and the facade had been modified over the decades in the way that commercial buildings get modified when their owners are trying to look modern, and the restoration reversed those modifications and put the building back as close to its original appearance as the evidence allowed.

The result is a building that looks like 1887 on the outside and like a carefully preserved piece of 1887 on the inside, which is not the same as looking like 1887 in the way that a building looks when nobody has touched it in a hundred years. The Huffman Grocery restoration is a deliberate act of historical memory, which is what most historic preservation is: a decision that some things are worth keeping even when keeping them costs more than replacing them.

Valentine Jacky's harness shop is gone, of course. The mules that needed harnesses are gone too, replaced first by gasoline engines and then by diesel ones. But the building where Jacky worked and Huffman sold groceries is still standing on Broadway, with its reconstructed facade and its tin ceiling, which is the kind of survival that a town like Philipsburg has learned to be grateful for.

See also

• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2009)
• Doe's Drug Store at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Walker Commercial Building at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)