John R. Toole House

By editor

Missoula, Missoula County, Montana, October 1902

The house at 1005 Gerald Avenue went up in 1902, and it went up in the neoclassical style that the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition had made fashionable among men who had money and wanted the street to know it. Full-length Doric columns across the front. Twelve-foot ceilings inside. Seven fireplaces of imported tile. Pocket doors, oak columns, and a three-part Palladian window that caught the afternoon light off the Clark Fork in a way that made visitors stop talking and look. Butte architect J.F. Everett drew the plans, and he drew them for a man who intended to be comfortable.

John Ryan Toole had arrived in Missoula in 1880 with enough capital and enough nerve to make himself useful in a town that was still deciding what it wanted to be. He opened a mercantile business, then a bank, then another bank, and by the time he built the house on Gerald Avenue he was president of copper king Marcus Daly's Missoula bank and the Daly milling company besides. He had served in the territorial legislature in 1886 and then the state legislature in 1890 after Montana came in as the forty-first state in 1889. He was the kind of man who got elected to things, appointed to things, and asked to chair things, and who managed to remain on good terms with everyone while doing all of it.

His brother Joseph was Montana's first governor, elected in 1889 when the ink on the state constitution was barely dry, and then again as the fourth governor in 1901. The Tooles were that kind of family -- the kind that shows up in a new place and within a generation has its name on the bank, the statehouse, and the history books. Joseph K. Toole served two terms as governor, resigning in 1908 for reasons of health. John's grandson K. Ross Toole became one of Montana's most respected historians, teaching at the University of Montana and writing the books that explained what the copper kings had done to the state they claimed to love. The family had a gift for being present at the important moments.

The house Toole built was not the largest in Missoula, but it was the most deliberate. Everett had studied the White City at the Chicago exposition, where Daniel Burnham and his colleagues had covered six hundred acres of Lake Michigan shoreline with plaster-and-jute buildings in the classical style and convinced a generation of American architects that the future of the republic looked like ancient Rome. Twenty-seven million people attended the exposition in its six-month run. They went home and told their architects what they had seen, and the architects obliged. The result was a wave of neoclassical courthouses, banks, and private residences that swept across the country in the 1890s and early 1900s, and Toole's house on Gerald Avenue was Missoula's contribution to that wave.

Everett was a Butte man, which meant he worked in a city where the copper money was so thick it had to be spent on something, and architecture was as good a use as any. He knew how to make a building look like it belonged to a man of consequence. The Doric columns at the front of the Toole house are full-length, running from the porch floor to the roofline, which is the kind of architectural decision that costs money and announces the fact. The fanlights above the main entry, the covered colonnaded terrace, the Palladian window -- each of these was a signal to anyone walking down Gerald Avenue that the man inside had been to Chicago, or at least had hired someone who had.

The marker inscription quotes Toole's biography on the subject of the fireside: "there was not a more attractive fireside in Montana." That is the kind of sentence a man's biographer writes when the man himself would have been too modest to say it, which means Toole probably said it first and the biographer was just recording the fact. Seven fireplaces of imported tile in a Montana house in 1902 is not modesty. It is a statement of position, made in ceramic and mortar.

Marcus Daly, whose bank Toole ran, had built his own mansion in Anaconda in 1889 -- thirty-seven rooms, a bowling alley, a billiard room, and stables for fifty horses. By that standard, the Toole house on Gerald Avenue was restrained. But Daly was a copper king who had pulled forty million dollars out of the Anaconda mine, and Toole was a banker and merchant who had made his money the slower way, by lending it to other people and waiting for them to pay it back with interest. The house reflected the difference. It was grand without being ostentatious, which in 1902 Missoula was probably the more difficult achievement.

The house survived three additions without losing its original symmetry, which is a harder architectural trick than it sounds. The fanlights above the main entry are still there. The colonnaded terrace is still there. The Palladian window still catches the afternoon light. When Anna Toole sold the house to the Kappa Kappa Gamma Alumnae Association in 1931, twelve years after her husband's death, she sold it to an organization that would keep it full of people, which is probably what a house with seven fireplaces requires to stay alive.

John Toole died on March 4, 1916, at sixty-six years old. He had come to Missoula when the Northern Pacific was still two years from completing its transcontinental line, when the town had fewer than a thousand people and the Clark Fork ran clear enough to drink from. He had watched the university go up on the south side of the river in 1895, watched the population climb past ten thousand, watched the lumber mills go in and the copper money come through from Butte and Anaconda. He had been a merchant and a banker and a legislator and a civic fixture for thirty-six years, and when he died the Missoulian ran his obituary on the front page.

The house on Gerald Avenue is now a sorority house, which means that on any given evening it contains approximately the same number of people it contained when the Tooles were raising their six children there and hosting the kind of parties that a man with twelve-foot ceilings and seven fireplaces is expected to host. The Doric columns do not know the difference. The Palladian window still catches the light. Somewhere in the building, behind a pocket door or beside one of the seven fireplaces of imported tile, a Kappa is doing what college students have done in that house since 1931, which is to say she is living in a room that was built for a man who believed that a good fireside was worth the trouble of importing the tile.

See also

• John R. Toole House at Missoula, Missoula County (Montana National Register Sign Program, erected 2019)
• North Hall at Missoula, Missoula County -- the University of Montana's first building, constructed the same decade Toole was building his house on Gerald Avenue