Deer Lodge County Courthouse
By editor
Anaconda, Deer Lodge County, Montana
Native people knew the valley as the lodge of the white-tailed deer. Idaho Territory made it Deer Lodge County; Montana’s first territorial legislature kept the name among the original nine counties. The seat bounced from Silver Bow to Deer Lodge before landing in Anaconda in 1896—Marcus Daly’s smelter town asserting itself as the county’s center of gravity.
A 1898 bond election paid for a courthouse. County Clerk Martin Martin insisted it sit at the head of Main Street, not mid-block, so that “a stranger visiting Anaconda has no need to ask where the court house is.” Architects Charles F. Bell and John N. Kent—also designers of the State Capitol in Helena—delivered a Neo-classical building of buff dressed sandstone with a two-tiered domed tower. Officials moved in from City Hall in the spring of 1900.
Inside, painted dome ribs simulate structure; frescoes and county seals by Consolidated Artists of Milwaukee fill the panels between them. An oak-and-marble spiral stair climbs past cast-iron newels that once wore electric lights. The building was meant to look like authority, and it still does. In a town built by copper money, the courthouse is the civic claim that Anaconda was more than a company camp—that it was a county seat with a dome you could see from the bottom of Main.
