Duncan Samson Block

By editor

Whitefish, Flathead County, Montana

Built in 1910 for about $32,000, the Duncan Samson Block was among Whitefish’s first brick buildings. Widow Jemima Duncan, newly arrived from Kalispell, saw opportunity in rooming houses for Great Northern employees after the railroad named Whitefish a division point. She married tie contractor J. A. Samson the year the building finished; they kept house in a downstairs apartment while single railroaders filled the rooms. As tenants married, Mrs. Samson moved into real estate from her own apartment, finding them small houses.

Over the years the block also held a shoe store, groceries, chiropractic offices, and a tax shop. In 1982 contractor Gary Tallman modernized units as condominiums. In the twenty-first century the building still belongs to apartment owners and main-floor businesses—coffee, landscape architecture, another chiropractor—its exterior little changed from the brick that rose on Second Street more than a century ago.