First Presbyterian Church

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, Summer 1893

The White Church went up in the summer of 1893, which was the worst possible year to build anything in Philipsburg. The Granite Mountain Mine had been producing two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in silver. The town had its saloons and its boarding houses and its merchants and its churches in progress, and the Presbyterians had been waiting since 1877 to have a building of their own. Then in November 1893, Congress repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, the price of silver fell by half, and three thousand people left Granite in twenty-four hours. The White Church had welcomed its first worshippers in the summer before all of that happened, which means the congregation spent its first winter in a building that had been planned for a boom town and was now serving a town in the process of becoming something considerably smaller.

The story of the church begins sixteen years before the building. Reverend Milton Cook organized Philipsburg's first Presbyterian congregation in 1877, when the town was new and the mines were just getting started. Cook did what circuit preachers did in mining towns: he organized, he preached when he could, and he moved on. Reverend George Edwards came from Missoula once a month to keep the congregation together. Once a month is not much, but it was what the town could support, and the congregation managed on it for fourteen years.

It was not until 1891 that Reverend Samuel Wishard arrived and established a permanent Presbyterian presence in Philipsburg. Wishard was the kind of minister who got things built. Services and Sunday school had been held in the schoolhouse, which was the standard arrangement in a town that had not yet gotten around to constructing dedicated religious facilities. The schoolhouse served multiple purposes in most Montana mining towns -- church on Sunday, school on weekdays, town meeting hall when the occasion required. It was practical and it was unglamorous, and it was what you used until you could afford something better.

Wishard decided the congregation could afford something better. By the summer of 1893, the building on West Kearney Street was ready, and the congregation moved in.

Then an early cold snap arrived, and the heating stoves had not yet been installed, and the congregation moved back out again. They held services at the Methodist Church until the stoves were in place, which is the kind of detail that does not appear in the official histories of most congregations but appears on this marker because whoever wrote it had a sense of humor about the difficulties of frontier church-building. The Presbyterians borrowed the Methodist furnace for a season, and nobody seems to have held it against them. The two congregations had been neighbors on Broadway for years, and they would be neighbors for another century before they finally merged in 1990.

The building itself is worth looking at. The steeple has a hexagonal copper dome, which is unusual enough that the marker singles it out as the most distinctive among Philipsburg's churches. Copper domes on church steeples are not common anywhere, and they are particularly uncommon in a silver mining town, where copper was the other metal, the one that belonged to Butte and Anaconda and Marcus Daly's empire to the north. The intricate scrollwork around the dome adds to the effect. Below the steeple, the facade has a Gothic window with tracery, lancet openings, and a round window, which is a considerable amount of architectural ambition for a frame building in a town that was about to lose half its population.

The building sits on the north side of Broadway, on what the marker calls "church row." The local watering holes are all on the opposite side of the street. The marker notes this with what appears to be civic pride: "maintaining the historic separation of secular and spiritual." Philipsburg in the 1890s had eighteen saloons for a population of around three thousand, which works out to one saloon per one hundred and sixty-seven residents, and the Presbyterians on the north side of Broadway were presumably aware of the mathematics. The White Church and the saloons faced each other across the street for the better part of a century, and the street is still there, and so is the church.

The congregation that Wishard built held together through the lean years after 1893. The three thousand people who left Granite did not all leave Philipsburg, and the ones who stayed still needed a church on Sundays. The Bi-Metallic Mine reopened in a smaller way in the late 1890s, and the town found a new equilibrium at a lower level of prosperity. The White Church was part of that equilibrium. It was there on Sundays when the miners needed it, and it was there on weekdays when it was not needed, which is what churches are for.

The Presbyterians held services in the White Church until 1990, which is ninety-seven years of Sundays in a building that had been planned for a boom town and survived the bust. In 1990 the congregation joined with the Methodists to share their facility, which closed a loop that had been open since the winter of 1893 when the Presbyterians borrowed the Methodist furnace. The two congregations had been neighbors on church row for nearly a century. Sharing a building was, in a sense, the logical conclusion.

The hexagonal copper dome is still there. The Gothic window with its tracery and lancet openings is still there. The scrollwork is still there. The building is still white, which is how it got its name and how it keeps it. On the south side of Broadway, the buildings that housed the saloons have mostly been repurposed, though a few still serve their original function in a more regulated way. The separation of secular and spiritual, maintained since 1893, remains in effect.

See also

• First Presbyterian Church at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2022)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the silver boom town whose 1893 collapse reshaped the congregation the White Church was built to serve