Doe's Drug Store

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, September 2025

In the 1880s and 1890s, masonry structures gradually replaced the frame buildings left from Philipsburg's mining camp days, which is the polite way of saying that the town had burned down enough times to learn something. Wood burns fast and completely, and a mining camp that loses its buildings to fire loses its inventory and its records and sometimes its people along with them. Brick does not burn, which is why every town that expects to survive eventually builds in brick, and why the buildings that Philipsburg put up in the 1880s are still standing while the wooden ones are not.

Doe and Hoyer constructed the building at 120 East Broadway in 1887, which was the year the Granite Mountain Mine was producing silver at a rate that made the future look straightforward. The building was commercial brick, two stories, with enough floor space for two separate businesses: Modini's Grand Hotel and Restaurant took the west half, and M.E. Doe set up his drug store on the east half of the ground floor. This was a sensible arrangement. A man who has just arrived in Philipsburg needs a place to sleep and a place to eat, and if he has a toothache or a fever, he needs a drug store. Modini and Doe were covering the essential requirements of civilization.

The Grand Hotel and Restaurant was the kind of establishment that a mining town builds when it wants to signal that it has arrived. The word "Grand" in a hotel name in 1887 Montana was aspirational rather than descriptive; it meant that the proprietor had tablecloths and a menu rather than a plank table and whatever the cook felt like making. Modini's Grand Hotel served the mine managers and the traveling salesmen and the lawyers who came to Philipsburg on business, and it served them in a building that was made of brick and therefore implied permanence.

M.E. Doe's drug store served everyone else. A drug store in a mining town in the 1880s was not primarily a pharmacy in the modern sense; it was a general purveyor of medicines, chemicals, and sundries, which included everything from laudanum to tooth powder to the carbolic acid that the mine operators used to disinfect the underground workings. The doctor who set broken bones and treated the fevers that ran through the mine camps was a separate establishment, but the drug store was where his prescriptions were filled, and where the men who could not afford a doctor bought the patent medicines that promised to do the same work for less money. Doe and his sons managed the drug store for eighty-two years, from 1887 until 1969, which is a tenure that makes most business relationships look casual.

The second floor of the building served a variety of purposes over the years, as second floors in commercial buildings tend to do. In the boom years, it housed offices and meeting rooms for the mine managers and the lawyers and the assayers who were the professional class of a silver mining town. After 1893, when the professional class thinned out considerably, the second floor became rental space for whoever needed it, which is the second floor's natural condition in a town that is no longer growing.

The drug store even sold the town's first gasoline, hand pumped from barrels out front, which is the kind of detail that tells you something about the pace of change in Philipsburg. The automobile arrived in Montana in the first decade of the twentieth century, and the first place in Philipsburg that sold fuel for it was the drug store on Broadway, because the drug store was where you went when you needed something that nobody else had yet thought to stock. M.E. Doe and his sons were pragmatic businessmen, and pragmatic businessmen sell gasoline when gasoline is what people need.

The silver crash of 1893 changed the economics of the building without changing its occupants. Modini's Grand Hotel eventually closed, as hotels do when the traveling population shrinks, but the drug store kept going. The Doe family served the ranchers and their families who replaced the miners as Philipsburg's primary population, and they served the county seat's administrative class, and they served whoever came through town on the highway that eventually replaced the wagon roads. The building that Doe and Hoyer had put up for a mining boom became a fixture of a ranching county, which required a different kind of inventory but the same kind of persistence.

The building at 120 East Broadway is still there, with the dark brick that George Harn's kilns fired from Flint Creek clay and the general proportions of a commercial building designed to last. The Doe family closed the drug store in 1969, eighty-two years after M.E. Doe first opened it, which means the store outlasted the mine that created the town, the hotel that shared its building, and most of the other businesses that had been operating on Broadway in 1887. The gasoline barrels out front are long gone, replaced by a gas station somewhere else in town, but the building where Doe and Hoyer put up their brick in 1887 is still making the argument that brick was the right choice.

The Montana Historical Society placed a marker at Doe's Drug Store because the building and the business it housed represent the kind of continuity that a town like Philipsburg depends on. The Granite Mountain Mine was spectacular and brief. The drug store was ordinary and long. In the end, the ordinary things are what keep a town alive, and the Doe family's eighty-two years on East Broadway is as good an argument for that proposition as Philipsburg has to offer.

See also

• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2009)
• C.T. Huffman Grocery at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)