Larabie Brothers Bank

By editor

Deer Lodge, Powell County, Montana, 1912

The Larabie Brothers Bank at the corner of Main and Cottonwood in Deer Lodge was built in 1912 to look like money. Wide cement pilasters, a gabled pediment above the entrance, large plate-glass windows, and a roofline balustrade: the whole composition was designed by a Seattle architect named Michael Beezer to say, in the language of neoclassical architecture, that the money inside was safe. The interior was finished in marble and mahogany, which said the same thing in a more expensive language. This was no small matter in the days before Federal Deposit Insurance, when the only thing standing between a depositor and ruin was the reputation of the men who ran the bank.

The reputation of the Larabie firm was, in fact, considerable. The bank had grown from a Virginia City mercantile business whose principals included S. E. Larabie and W. A. Clark. Clark would later become better known as one of the Butte copper kings, a United States Senator, and one of the wealthiest men in America. In 1869, when the partnership was still operating out of an adobe building on Main and Cottonwood, Clark was a young man with ambitions that the adobe building could not contain. He left the partnership in the 1880s and went to Butte, where he found the copper that made him famous. Larabie stayed in Deer Lodge and ran the bank.

The bank that Larabie ran from the brick building on this corner, and later from the 1912 Beezer building, survived things that killed most of its competitors. Half of Montana's banks failed in 1923, during the agricultural depression that followed the First World War. Montana's farmers had borrowed heavily during the war years, when wheat prices were high and land prices were higher. When prices collapsed after 1919, the farmers could not repay their loans, and the banks that had made the loans could not survive the defaults. The Larabie bank survived through what the marker calls "prudent management," which is banker's language for not lending money to people who could not pay it back.

W. A. Clark, for his part, had no such scruples. He was a man who believed that the way to get rich was to find the thing that other people needed and charge them as much as possible for it. In Butte, the thing was copper wire, which the electrifying world needed in quantities that no one had previously imagined. Clark built a copper empire, a newspaper, a railroad, and a mansion in New York City. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1899 in an election so thoroughly purchased that the Senate itself refused to seat him; he resigned, ran again, and won a seat in 1901. He died in 1925, leaving an estate of $50 million and a reputation that his contemporaries debated vigorously.

The Anaconda Standard, which was owned by Clark's rival Marcus Daly and therefore not inclined to speak well of him, described Clark's Senate election in 1899 as "the most shameless and brazen attempt to purchase a seat in the United States Senate that has ever been made in this country." Clark's supporters described it differently. The Senate committee that investigated the election found that Clark had spent approximately $272,000 on the campaign, most of it distributed directly to members of the Montana legislature, which in those days elected senators. Clark resigned before the Senate could expel him. He called it a matter of principle.

The Larabie bank, meanwhile, continued to operate in Deer Lodge without purchasing any Senate seats. It survived the 1923 crisis, survived the 1920s depression, and finally met its end not through imprudence but through regulation. The New Deal banking reforms of the early 1930s required banks to meet new standards of capitalization and reporting. The Larabie bank could not comply. It closed in 1933, the same year that Franklin Roosevelt declared a national bank holiday and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was established to provide the guarantees that marble and mahogany had previously been expected to supply.

The building stands at the corner of Main and Cottonwood, its cement pilasters and gabled pediment still asserting stability, respectability, and permanence. The bank is gone. The building remains. This is the usual order of things.

See also

• Larabie Brothers Bank at Deer Lodge, Powell County (Montana Historical Society)
• Marcus Daly: An Irishman with Vision at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
• Organized Labor at Butte, Silver Bow County