McDonald House

By editor

Red Lodge, Carbon County, Montana, October 2024

The lot at 501 Hauser Avenue North in Red Lodge changed hands three times in three years, and each transaction tells you something about the kind of town Red Lodge was in the 1890s. The Rocky Fork Town and Electric Company sold it to F.P. Musser in 1896 for eighty-four dollars. Musser turned around and sold it to T.P. McDonald for a hundred and seventy-seven dollars. The marker at the site notes that this "netted Musser a handsome profit," which is the driest possible way of saying that Musser doubled his money in what appears to have been a very short time. T.P. McDonald was a real estate agent, which explains why he was willing to pay the premium. A real estate agent in a coal boom town in 1896 was a man who understood that land prices moved in one direction, and he was right, at least for a while.

The four-square cottage that stands on the lot was either moved there or built there by 1898, when the property changed hands again. The marker does not say who built it or who moved it, which is the kind of gap in the record that a historian finds maddening and a storyteller finds useful. What we know is that by 1899, the cottage had a new occupant: Frances Harney, who moved in with her small son. The 1900 census lists her occupation as "landlord," which is a word that covers a great deal of ground. Frances Harney was either widowed or divorced, the marker says, and she had decided that the way to make a living in Red Lodge was to take in boarders.

Taking in boarders in 1900 was not a genteel occupation, but it was a respectable one, and in a coal town with a chronic shortage of decent housing, it was also a profitable one. The Rocky Fork mine was running at full capacity, and men were coming to Red Lodge from Finland and Slovenia and Wales and Pennsylvania, looking for work and a place to sleep. Frances Harney offered them the latter. She ran the cottage as a rooming house, providing meals and laundry and the kind of domestic order that a man living far from his family was willing to pay for. After 1912, she expanded her operation by renting out a small dwelling on the alley behind the main house, which suggests that business was good enough to justify the investment.

The Hi Bug neighborhood, where the McDonald house stands, was the respectable residential district of Red Lodge, a cut above the company housing in the lower part of town. The name was a local joke that had become a point of pride. A "hi bug" was a person of some standing, and the neighborhood that bore the name was where the businessmen and the mine managers and the professionals lived. Frances Harney was not a mine manager or a professional, but she was a property owner and a landlord, and in the social arithmetic of a small Western town in 1900, that counted for something. She had a house in the right neighborhood, and she was making it pay.

The boarders who passed through the McDonald house over the years left almost no record. That is the nature of boarders. They came and went, they paid their rent, and they moved on. The one exception is Frank Lyle, who is described in the marker as a "Red Lodge businessman" and a "longtime boarder." Lyle stayed long enough and paid his rent faithfully enough that Frances Harney left him the property when she died in 1937. This is an unusual bequest. A woman who had spent thirty-eight years in a house, who had raised a son in it and run a business from it, left it not to her son but to a boarder. The marker does not explain why. Perhaps the son had moved away and made his own life elsewhere. Perhaps Lyle had been more than a boarder in the ordinary sense, had helped with repairs and taxes and the hundred small emergencies that come with owning a house. Perhaps Frances Harney simply trusted him more than she trusted anyone else.

The cottage itself is a modest building, as four-square cottages go. The form was the most common house plan in the American West in the 1890s and 1900s, available in pattern books and Sears catalogs, and it could be built by a competent carpenter in a few weeks. What makes the McDonald house distinctive is what was added to it around 1930: a sunporch and wings in the Craftsman style, which the marker describes as illustrating "the changing architectural tastes of Hi Bug residents." By 1930, the coal boom was over. The Rocky Fork mine had closed in 1924, and Red Lodge was reinventing itself as a tourist town, with the Beartooth Highway under construction and the mountains to the south being marketed to motorists from the cities. The Craftsman additions to the McDonald house are a small piece of that reinvention, a sign that whoever owned the house in 1930 was thinking about comfort and aesthetics rather than just shelter.

Frank Lyle inherited a house that had been a working rooming house for nearly four decades. Whether he continued to take in boarders or simply lived in it himself, the record does not say. What it says is that the house is still there, on the corner of Hauser Avenue and Sixth Street West, in the neighborhood that Frances Harney chose in 1899 because it was respectable and because the rent she could charge for a room in it was better than the rent she could charge in the lower part of town. She was right about that, as she appears to have been right about most things.

See also

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