Granite Ghost Town

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, April 2026

The mine was located on July 6, 1875, which is a fact that sounds more orderly than the actual event. What happened on July 6, 1875, was that a man named Charles McLure poked around in a shallow shaft that Eli Holland had dug three years earlier and then abandoned, and found some silver ore that looked promising. McLure did not have the capital to develop it himself, so he traveled to St. Louis to find investors, which is what you did in 1875 if you found something worth finding in the Montana mountains. The investors he found were willing to put money into a silver mine in a place they had never been, on the word of a man they had just met, in a territory that had been a state for exactly six years. This is the kind of confidence that built the American West, and it is also the kind of confidence that lost a great deal of money in the American West, though in this particular case it paid off.

The rich silver bonanza shoot was discovered in November 1882. The Philipsburg Mail, which had been covering the mine's progress with the enthusiasm of a newspaper that understood its own economic interests, reported the discovery in terms that suggested the editors had been waiting for this moment for years. The ore was ruby silver, a variety of silver sulfide that occurs in brilliant red crystals and assays at extremely high grades. The Granite Mountain Mining Company, which had been working the property since McLure brought in his St. Louis investors, suddenly found itself in possession of one of the richest silver mines in the United States.

By the late 1880s, the mine was producing $250,000 per month in silver. The town of Granite, which had grown up around the mine at an elevation of seven thousand feet above sea level, had a population of three thousand people. Three thousand people at seven thousand feet, three miles up a mountain from the nearest town of any size, in a place where the winters were long and the supply lines were tenuous. They had a Miners Union Hall, which was a large and handsome building by the standards of the time. They had a library. They had eighteen saloons, which is a ratio of one saloon per 167 residents, a figure that suggests the miners had their priorities sorted out. They had a hospital, a school, and several churches, which suggests that some of them had other priorities as well.

The Superintendent's House stood at the head of Magnolia Avenue, which the residents called Silk Stocking Row because it was where the mine's management class lived. The superintendent of the Granite Mountain Mining Company occupied the first floor. The second floor may have been used as a boarding house for single men, which would have made for an interesting domestic arrangement. The house was built of stone, which was the right material for a building at seven thousand feet, and it is still standing today, stabilized by Montana State Parks, the most permanent thing left of a city that was once home to three thousand people.

The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was passed by Congress in 1890. It required the United States Treasury to purchase 4.5 million ounces of silver per month at market prices, which had the effect of supporting the price of silver and keeping mines like Granite profitable. The Act was a political compromise between the silver-producing states of the West and the gold-standard advocates of the East, and like most political compromises it satisfied no one completely and created problems that neither side had anticipated. The silver producers wanted free coinage of silver at a ratio of sixteen to one against gold. The Treasury purchases were a consolation prize.

In 1893, the price of silver collapsed. The reasons were multiple: overproduction from new mines in the West, the demonetization of silver by European governments, and the general financial panic of that year. President Grover Cleveland called a special session of Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and Congress obliged in November 1893. The repeal removed the government support that had been keeping the silver price artificially elevated, and the price dropped further.

The Granite Mountain Mining Company closed the mine. The Philipsburg Mail reported the closure with the restraint of a newspaper that was watching its own community collapse. Three thousand people left Granite. The figure that circulates in the histories is that they left in twenty-four hours, which may be an exaggeration, but the departure was certainly rapid. The mine had been the reason for the town's existence, and when the mine closed, the reason was gone. There was no other reason to live at seven thousand feet in the Granite Range in the winter of 1893.

The mine reopened briefly in 1911 and again in 1912, when the price of silver recovered enough to make some of the remaining ore worth working. The reopenings employed a fraction of the original workforce and produced a fraction of the original output. They were the last gasps of an enterprise that had already spent its substance.

The Miners Union Hall collapsed long ago. Three walls and a pile of rubble remain. The stone Superintendent's House is stabilized and open to visitors. The bank, the Catholic church, the California House, and the score of other buildings that made up the town are now archaeological sites, their foundations visible in the grass. The state of Montana maintains the site as Granite Ghost Town State Park. It covers 0.6 acres, which makes it the smallest state park in Montana. The entire city of Granite, the saloons and the library and the hospital and the eighteen saloons, fits into 0.6 acres of state park.

The ruby silver that started it all is in museums now, in collections in Helena and Missoula and St. Louis, where McLure's investors came from. It is still brilliant red in the display cases, unchanged by the century and a half since the bonanza shoot was found.

See also

• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2005)
• Superintendent's House at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the stone house on Silk Stocking Row that outlasted the city around it
• Walker Commercial Building at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the 1905 commercial building that A.J. Gibson designed for a town that intended to stay