Hamilton Commercial Historic District

By editor

Hamilton, Ravalli County, Montana, 1890

Marcus Daly came to the Bitterroot Valley to raise race horses. This is the kind of statement that sounds like a joke about the rich, but it was literally true. Daly had made his fortune in the copper mines of Butte, where his Anaconda Company was pulling more metal out of the earth than any other operation in the world, and he wanted somewhere quiet to breed thoroughbreds. The Bitterroot Valley, with its mild climate and its long meadows, suited him. He bought land. He built stables. He imported horses from Kentucky.

And then, because Daly was constitutionally incapable of doing one thing when he could do several, he noticed that his mines and smelter in Butte needed timber. The Bitterroot Valley had timber. The connection was obvious to a man who had spent his career turning natural resources into money, and by 1888 Daly had built the Big Mill on the west bank of the Bitterroot River, a sawmill that cut millions of board feet annually and shipped the lumber north to feed the Anaconda operation. The mill needed workers. The workers needed a town.

Daly sent an engineer named James Hamilton to the valley. Hamilton's instructions were to buy land quietly, without advertising who he was buying it for, and to plat a townsite. He bought 160 acres from area farmers who did not know they were selling to the Copper King, and in 1890 he laid out the streets of the town that would bear his name. Main Street ran east-west, with the Big Mill at the western end and the Northern Pacific Railroad at the eastern end. The logic was industrial: everything that came into Hamilton came by rail, and everything that left it went to the mill or came from it.

By 1893, more than forty businesses had opened downtown. The mill workers who filled them wore heavy boots that resounded on the wooden boardwalks lining Main Street, a detail that the marker preserves because it is the kind of detail that tells you what a town sounded like before it tells you what it looked like. A town of mill workers in 1893 sounded like men who worked hard and spent what they earned on a Saturday night, and Hamilton's commercial district was built to accommodate that.

The merchants who built those early businesses were practical men building practical buildings: false-front wood construction, quickly erected, easily modified, and highly flammable. The fires that swept through western mining and mill towns in the 1880s and 1890s were a recurring argument for masonry, and Hamilton's downtown merchants eventually made the switch. They replaced the false fronts with buildings constructed from locally manufactured brick or from the blue-gray stone quarried in nearby Corvallis, which gave Hamilton's Main Street a solidity that distinguished it from the temporary-looking commercial strips of most Montana mill towns.

New money arrived after 1907. The Bitterroot apple boom, which had been building since the 1890s as irrigation projects opened the valley's benchlands to orchard cultivation, reached its peak in the decade before the First World War. Promoters advertised Bitterroot apples as the finest in the world, and for a time the claims were not entirely false. Hamilton's population grew to three thousand. The downtown gained several stylish architect-designed buildings, identifiable by their high-fire brick, metal mullion storefronts, and leaded glass transoms, the architectural vocabulary of prosperity in the early twentieth century.

The apple boom collapsed in the 1920s, as most booms do, when the combination of a blight, falling prices, and the realization that the Bitterroot benchlands were not quite as fertile as the promoters had claimed caught up with the orchardists. Hamilton survived the collapse because it had something the apple boom had not provided: the Rocky Mountain Laboratory.

The laboratory had been established in the 1920s to study Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a tick-borne illness that was killing people across the region and that no one understood well enough to treat. The scientists who came to Hamilton to study the disease stayed, and the laboratory grew, and the federal payroll it represented sustained the town's economy through the Depression and into the postwar years. The work done there eventually produced a vaccine and a treatment, and the laboratory continued to operate as a federal research facility long after the disease it was founded to combat had been brought under control.

H.E. Kirkemo, a Missoula architect, designed the Bower Building at South Second and West Main in the 1930s, its smooth lines and stripped classical detail reflecting the architectural fashions of the decade. The wood-frame false-front building at 411 West Main, still standing, reflects the fashions of 1890. Between those two buildings, Hamilton's commercial district contains most of the story of a town that was born of copper money, grew on apple money, and survived on federal money, and that managed, through all of it, to keep its Main Street intact.

The mill is gone. The apple orchards are mostly gone. The horses Daly brought to the valley are long gone. Main Street is still there.

See also

• Hamilton Commercial Historic District at Hamilton, Ravalli County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2018)
• Carnegie Library at Hamilton, Ravalli County -- Margaret Daly's land gift and Andrew Carnegie's $9,000
• Daly Mansion at Hamilton, Ravalli County -- Marcus Daly's Bitterroot Valley estate