McCleary House

By editor

Red Lodge, Carbon County, Montana, October 2024

The house at the corner of Hauser Avenue and Seventh Street West in Red Lodge sits on a piece of ground that coal made possible and coal eventually made irrelevant. It is a four-square frame house with a hipped roof and a front porch, the kind of house that a man builds when he has decided that the boom is real and that he intends to stay. Frank McCleary built it, and the neighborhood it stands in was called Hi Bug, which is what the people who lived there called themselves to distinguish their address from the coal camp below, where the miners lived in company houses and paid company prices at the company store.

Red Lodge in 1906 was a town of about four thousand people, most of them connected in one way or another to the Rocky Fork Coal Company, which had been digging coal out of the Carbon County hills since 1889. The coal went north to Billings and east to the Northern Pacific Railroad, which burned it in its locomotives and sold it to the towns along its line. The miners who dug it were Finnish and Slavic and Italian and Welsh, and they lived in a part of town that the Hi Bug residents could see from their front porches but preferred not to visit. Frank McCleary was not a miner. He was a businessman, which in Red Lodge in 1906 meant that he sold things to miners and to the people who managed miners, and that he lived on the hill.

The Hi Bug neighborhood took its name from a term that the miners themselves coined, half in jest and half in earnest, to describe the people who had climbed above the coal dust. A "hi bug" was a person of some local consequence, a man who wore a collar to work and whose wife kept a parlor. The neighborhood that bore the name was a grid of streets above the downtown commercial district, where the houses had front porches and flower gardens and, in the better ones, a second story with a bedroom for guests. The McCleary house had all of these things, and it had something more: it had Ella.

Ella McCleary was the kind of woman who made a neighborhood. The Red Lodge Picket reported in 1914 that she had hosted "a floral whist party and midnight supper" at the house, which tells you several things at once. It tells you that the McClearys had a parlor large enough to accommodate a card party. It tells you that Ella had the social confidence to organize one. It tells you that the guests stayed until midnight, which means the food was good and the company was better. A floral whist party was not a simple affair. The tables were decorated with cut flowers, the guests played whist in rotating partnerships, and the hostess was judged by the quality of the supper that followed. Ella McCleary passed that judgment with enough distinction that the newspaper thought it worth recording.

The house itself was built to make such evenings possible. The four-square plan, which was the most popular house form in the American West between 1895 and 1915, gave a family four rooms on each floor, arranged around a central staircase, with the parlor and dining room on the ground floor and the bedrooms above. It was a democratic form, available in pattern books and mail-order catalogs, and it could be dressed up or down depending on the budget. The McCleary house was dressed up. The exterior had decorative woodwork in the gable ends and a porch with turned columns, and the interior had the kind of finish work that a man orders when he wants his house to look like it cost more than it did, which is a perfectly reasonable ambition.

Red Lodge in 1914, when Ella hosted her whist party, was still a coal town, but it was beginning to be other things as well. The Beartooth Highway had not yet been built -- that would come in 1936 -- but the mountains to the south were already drawing summer visitors who came to fish the Rock Creek and camp in the high meadows. The town had a Carnegie Library, built in 1909, and a high school, and a hospital, and the kind of civic infrastructure that a community builds when it believes in its own future. The Hi Bug neighborhood was the physical expression of that belief. The people who built houses there were betting that Red Lodge would still be a going concern in twenty years, and they were right, though the coal that underwrote the bet would eventually run out.

Frank McCleary did not live to see the coal run out. The Rocky Fork mine closed in 1924, the victim of cheaper coal from Wyoming and the shift from coal to oil in the railroad locomotives. By then the Hi Bug neighborhood had been built out, and the houses that lined Hauser Avenue and the cross streets were occupied by families who had found other ways to make a living in Carbon County. The McCleary house passed through several owners after Frank's death, each of them inheriting the parlor where Ella had set the whist tables and the dining room where the midnight supper had been served.

The house still stands, and the neighborhood around it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the Red Lodge Hi Bug Historic District. The district contains about sixty houses built between 1896 and 1930, most of them in the four-square or Craftsman styles that were fashionable in those years. They are not grand houses. They are the houses of people who were comfortable but not wealthy, who wanted a parlor and a front porch and a neighborhood where the children could play in the street. The coal that built them is gone, and the company that dug it is gone, and most of the people who lived in them are gone. But the houses remain, and on a summer evening, with the Beartooth Mountains visible to the south and the smell of cut grass in the air, it is not hard to imagine Ella McCleary setting out the flower arrangements and counting the chairs.

See also

• McCleary House at Red Lodge, Carbon County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2021)
• Red Lodge Hi Bug Historic District -- National Register of Historic Places listing for the neighborhood
• McDonald House at Red Lodge, Carbon County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2022)