Fraternity Hall

By editor

Elkhorn, Jefferson County, Montana, 1893

Peter Wys was a Swiss miner, which is to say he knew something about mountains and something about silver, and in the 1870s he put both kinds of knowledge to use in the hills above Boulder, Montana. He found the Elkhorn Mine. He found it, and then he died, which is the kind of thing that happens to men who find things in Montana. The finding is the interesting part. The dying comes later and is considerably less interesting, except to the lawyers.

After Wys died in 1872, a Helena entrepreneur named Anton M. Holter and his partners developed the mine. Holter was the kind of man who understood that the real money in a silver mine is not in the silver but in the selling. He developed the Elkhorn Mine until it was worth selling, and then he sold it to an English syndicate around 1888, which is when the town of Elkhorn began to believe in itself.

At its peak, Elkhorn housed more than 2,500 residents. Three passenger trains arrived weekly on the Northern Pacific's branch line. The Masons were there, and the Oddfellows, and the Knights of Pythias, and all the other fraternal organizations that nineteenth-century Americans joined in order to have somewhere to go on a Tuesday evening that was not a saloon. In 1893, the Fraternity Hall Association incorporated to build the town's architectural and social center. They named it Fraternity Hall, which was accurate: the various fraternal organizations shared its upstairs lodge room, and the downstairs served as the heart of the community.

The hall was built in the Greek Revival style, which is the style that Americans of the 1890s used when they wanted to suggest that what they were doing had classical precedent. The false front is common to mining camps across the West -- it is the architectural equivalent of a man in a borrowed suit, presenting a face to the street that has no particular relationship to what is behind it. But the neo-classical balcony above the entry is unique. The elaborate ornamentation at the roofline recalls elements crafted of stone or brick in more urban places, here adapted to readily available wood. The ambition is real. The material is honest. The combination is Montana.

The hall hosted dances, traveling theatrical troupes, graduations, and prize fights. These are not, on the face of it, activities that belong in the same building, but in a mining camp of 2,500 people, you use the building you have. The Masons met upstairs. The prize fights happened downstairs. The theatrical troupes performed wherever there was room. The dances were probably the most popular, because in a town where the men outnumbered the women by a considerable margin, a dance was an event of genuine social consequence.

The Silver Panic of 1893 arrived the same year the hall was built, which is the kind of timing that makes a man wonder about the relationship between ambition and fate. The panic was caused by the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which had required the federal government to purchase a fixed quantity of silver each month. When Congress repealed the act, the price of silver collapsed, and the silver towns of Montana collapsed with it. By 1897, the Elkhorn mines had begun to play out. The town shrank slowly through the early twentieth century.

The death knell sounded when the Northern Pacific removed its tracks in 1931. Without the railroad, Elkhorn was simply a collection of buildings in a valley with no particular reason to exist. The residents left. The buildings stayed.

The Anaconda Standard reported in 1893, when the panic first hit, that "the silver men of Montana are watching events in Washington with a degree of anxiety that borders on desperation." The silver men of Elkhorn watched events in Washington and then watched their town empty out. Fraternity Hall watched all of it. It is still watching.

The hall is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. It has endured time, neglect, and the heavy snows of a hundred Montana winters to become one of the most photographed buildings in the state. Peter Wys found the silver. Anton Holter sold the mine. The English syndicate ran it until the panic. The fraternal organizations built the hall. The railroad took its tracks away. The hall remained. That is the whole story, and it is a better story than most.

See also

• Fraternity Hall at Elkhorn, Jefferson County (Montana Historical Society)
• The Prickly Pear Diggings at Montana City, Jefferson County
• Gold in Alder Gulch at Virginia City, Madison County