Patten Residence

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, September 2025

George Harn ran one of the two brickyards in Philipsburg in the 1880s, which meant he was in a position to profit from the town's ambition in a way that most people could not. When a mining camp decides it is going to be a real town, the first thing it does is start replacing its wooden buildings with brick ones, because wood burns and brick does not, and a town that burns down twice tends to lose its optimism. Philipsburg had made that decision, and Harn had the kilns to serve it.

The brick he made was fired locally, from clay dug out of the Flint Creek Valley, and it had the dark, slightly irregular quality of brick that is made by hand rather than by machine. You can see it in the buildings along Broadway: the color is not the uniform red of Eastern commercial brick but something darker and more variable, as if the clay itself had opinions about the process. The Granite Mountain Mine was producing silver at a rate that justified the expense of permanent construction, and the merchants and professionals who had come to Philipsburg to serve the mine were building accordingly.

Harn built the residence at what is now the Patten address sometime in the 1880s, probably using his own brick, because a brickyard owner who builds himself a frame house is making a statement he would rather not make. The house was one-and-one-half stories, with a hipped roof and a bay window whose wood-paneled spandrels announced that the owner had both taste and money, which in Philipsburg in 1887 were not always the same thing. The porches had slender turned columns, decorative brackets, spindled balustrades, and scrolled friezes, which is the vocabulary of Queen Anne residential architecture adapted for a mining town at the edge of the Rockies.

George Harn's brickyard was one of the essential industries of Philipsburg's building boom. The other brickyard was run by a man named Gormley, and the two operations between them supplied the material for most of the permanent construction that went up in the town during the 1880s. The brickyards were not large operations by the standards of industrial brick production; they were local enterprises, dependent on local clay and local labor, and the brick they produced reflected both. The irregularity of color and texture that you see in the Broadway buildings is not a defect; it is the signature of a craft process, and it is part of what makes the Philipsburg Historic District look like itself rather than like a catalog of standard commercial brick.

James Patten Sr. came from Illinois and purchased the house from Harn in 1887. He was a prominent businessman, involved in the operation of the Trout and Sweet Home Mines in the surrounding hills, which meant he had a stake in the same silver economy that was filling the Granite Mountain Mine's ore cars and paying for the brick buildings on Broadway. The house on Kearney Street was the kind of house a man buys when he expects to stay, which is to say it was a bet on the future of Philipsburg.

The future of Philipsburg, as it turned out, was more complicated than the house implied. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act, which had been propping up the price of silver since 1890, was repealed by Congress in November 1893, and the Granite Mountain Mine closed within months. The three thousand people who had been living on the mountain above town left in a single day. The Trout and Sweet Home Mines, which had been operating in the shadow of the bigger operation, did not survive the price collapse either.

James Patten Sr. stayed. This is worth noting because a great many people did not. The town's population fell from something over three thousand to something under five hundred in the space of a few years, and the houses and commercial buildings that had been built for a boom town had to find a new purpose in a county seat that was pivoting to ranching. The Patten residence, with its turned columns and spindled balustrades, became a house in a quieter town, which is not the same thing as a house in a dying town.

The Queen Anne style that Harn had built into the house was already a little old-fashioned by the time Patten bought it. The style had peaked in the 1880s and was giving way to the simpler lines of the Colonial Revival and the Craftsman bungalow by the time the silver crash came. But in Philipsburg, where the architectural clock had stopped in 1893, the Queen Anne houses survived because there was no particular reason to replace them. The town did not have the money for a building boom, and it did not have the population to justify one.

The house at the Patten address is one of the better-preserved examples of the residential architecture that Philipsburg built during its silver years. The bay window is still there, and the decorative brackets, and the general air of a house that was built by someone who expected to be comfortable for a long time. Whether James Patten Sr. achieved that comfort, or whether the silver crash made it theoretical, the records are not entirely clear. What is clear is that he built well, and that George Harn's brick has outlasted the mine that paid for it.

James Patten Sr.'s son, James Patten Jr., grew up in the house on Kearney Street and remained in Philipsburg after the silver crash, as his father had. The Patten family became part of the ranching economy that replaced the mining economy, which required a different set of skills and a different relationship to the land. The Trout and Sweet Home Mines eventually reopened during the manganese boom of the First World War, when the same mountains that had produced silver were found to contain manganese ore that the steel industry needed. The Pattens were there for that too, which is the kind of continuity that a family achieves when it decides to stay in a place rather than follow the next boom to the next camp.

The Montana Historical Society placed a marker at the Patten Residence because it represents the domestic ambition of Philipsburg's silver era: the moment when a mining camp decided it was a town, and started building houses that looked like it meant to stay. The Granite Mountain Mine is a ghost town now, and the Miners' Union Hall is a museum, but the house on Kearney Street is still a house, which is its own kind of argument about permanence.

See also

• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2009)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Schuh-Nowak Residence at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)