Philipsburg Historic District

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, 1893

The National Register of Historic Places exists, in part, to document the things that survived by accident. Philipsburg's historic district is one of those things. The sixty-odd buildings that make up the district were not preserved because anyone decided to preserve them. They were preserved because the silver market collapsed in 1893 and nobody had the money to tear them down and build something new. The crash that ruined the First National Bank and emptied the Granite Mountain Mine and sent three thousand people out of the Flint Creek Valley in what witnesses described as a single day also froze the town's architecture in place, like a fly in amber, at the moment of its greatest prosperity.

This is not the usual story of historic preservation, which tends to involve committees and nominations and the careful documentation of architectural significance. The Philipsburg story is simpler and more brutal: the town built well during the boom years of the 1880s, the boom ended before anyone could replace the good buildings with worse ones, and the buildings were still standing when the preservationists arrived a century later to write them up.

The boom years produced a particular kind of commercial architecture. The buildings on Broadway and the surrounding streets are two and three stories of brick, with metal cornices, chamfered corners, pressed-metal facades, and the other decorative vocabulary of the Victorian commercial idiom. They were built by men who expected the silver to last, and who built accordingly. The Sayrs' Building, originally the Hyde Block, went up in 1888 with a modillioned cornice and a chamfered corner that announced the owner's prosperity. The Wilson Brothers Building, also 1888, had a hand-over-hand hoist that was still in use when the district was nominated. The J.K. Merrill and Sons Dry Goods store had twelve thousand square feet of floor space and a pressed-metal colonnade. These were not temporary structures. They were the architecture of a town that believed in itself.

Silver was discovered south of here in 1864, and by 1867 the camp was growing at the rate of one house per day, according to the area newspaper. The camp was named for Philip Deidesheimer, the German-born mining engineer who had invented the square-set timbering system at the Comstock Lode in Nevada and arrived here in 1866 to manage the St. Louis and Montana Mining Company's operations. The first buildings were wooden false-fronts, the architecture of a camp that had not yet decided whether it was going to become a town. Most of them did not survive the decade. The Hope Mill shut down, the population left, and Philipsburg reverted to a small settlement waiting for the next development.

The next development came in the mid-1880s, when new capital and improved milling technology made the silver deposits economically viable again. This time the builders used brick. The Granite Mountain Mine, three miles up the road, was producing between $250,000 and $275,000 worth of silver per month at its peak. The population reached three thousand. The false-fronts came down and the masonry went up, and the masonry that went up in the 1880s is the masonry that is still standing today.

The 1893 crash preserved it. Granite County was created in 1893, the same year as the crash, with Philipsburg as the county seat, and the county government kept the town alive at a reduced scale through the lean years. The courthouse kept the lawyers and the clerks and the commissioners in place, and they kept the hotels and the stores and the churches in business. The sapphire deposits in the Sapphire Range to the south provided a modest additional income. The manganese boom during the First World War provided another interval of prosperity. But none of these subsequent booms produced the kind of rapid growth that would have required tearing down the 1880s buildings to make room for something larger.

Granite, three miles up the road, became a ghost town because it had no courthouse, no county seat, no function beyond the mine. When the mine closed, Granite emptied completely. The buildings that remain there are ruins, roofless and deteriorating, because no one has lived in them for a century. Philipsburg's buildings are occupied and maintained because the town has always had a reason to exist beyond the silver.

The residential architecture of the district is as significant as the commercial buildings, though it receives less attention. The houses built by the mine managers and merchants and lawyers of the 1880s and 1890s are still standing on the streets above Broadway, and they represent the same moment in time as the commercial buildings: the years when the silver was flowing and the men who benefited from it were building homes they expected to occupy for the rest of their lives. The Schuh-Nowak Residence, built in the 1880s, housed Mary Schuh, who was described as the first white woman to settle in the Cable mining district to the south. The First Presbyterian Church, built in 1891, borrowed the Methodist furnace for its first winter because the congregation had not yet installed its own heating system. These details are not in the National Register nomination. They are in the local histories and the newspaper archives and the memories of the people who grew up in the town, and they are the texture of what the nomination is trying to preserve.

The district was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of what the town's economic misfortune had accidentally preserved: an unusually intact collection of late-nineteenth-century commercial and residential architecture that documents the material culture of a Montana silver mining town at the height of its prosperity. The buildings are not museum pieces. They are in use. The Courtney Hotel, built in 1918 on manganese profits, houses the Granite County Museum. The drug stores and tailor's shops have been replaced by antique dealers and restaurants, but the buildings that house them are the same buildings that housed the original tenants.

Philip Deidesheimer, who gave the town its name, died destitute in San Francisco in 1916, having lost his real estate fortune in the 1906 earthquake. The square-set timbering system he invented without patenting was still in use in mines around the world on the day he died. The town named for him was still standing. It is still standing now.

See also

• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 1985)
• Philipsburg at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Superintendent's House at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)