Philipsburg

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, 1866

Philip Deidesheimer arrived in Philipsburg in 1866 as the most famous mining engineer in the American West, which is a distinction that sounds more comfortable than it was. He had invented the square-set timbering system six years earlier at the Ophir Mine on the Comstock Lode in Nevada, and the invention had transformed underground mining on a continental scale. The system used interlocking timbers mortised into modular cubes, each cube eighteen inches on a side, that formed a self-supporting lattice capable of holding up the walls and ceiling of an ore body fifty feet wide without the traditional pillars that ate into the ore itself. Every major mine in the West adopted it. Deidesheimer never patented it. He gave it away, or rather he failed to protect it, which amounts to the same thing. The men who used his system grew rich. He did not.

The St. Louis and Montana Mining Company sent him to Philipsburg to manage their mines and stamp mills, and for a time the arrangement was productive. Silver had been 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 Deidesheimer, which was the custom when a man of his reputation arrived to run an operation: you named the place after him, and the naming was understood to be a form of advertisement, a signal to investors that serious people were in charge. The town was called Philipsburg because Philip Deidesheimer was there, and Philip Deidesheimer was there because the silver was there, and the silver was there because the geology of the Flint Creek Valley had arranged itself in a particular way over the preceding three hundred million years, which is the kind of coincidence that looks like destiny from a distance.

James Stuart pushed Deidesheimer out of the operation before long, as men with political connections tend to push out men with technical ones, and the Hope Mill shut down, and the town largely emptied. This was 1868 or thereabouts. The buildings that had gone up in the previous two years were not the masonry buildings that stand on Broadway today; they were the wooden false-front structures 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 revival came in the mid-1880s, when new capital and new technology made the silver deposits economically viable again. This time the buildings that went up were brick, and the men who built them intended to stay. The Granite Mountain Mine, three miles up the road at the ghost town that now bears that name, was producing between $250,000 and $275,000 worth of silver per month at its peak. The population of the area reached three thousand. Philipsburg acquired the commercial infrastructure of a real town: banks, hotels, churches, a school, a newspaper, a fire department. The false-fronts were replaced with masonry. The masonry is still there.

Then 1893. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in November, the price of silver collapsed, and the Granite Mountain Mine shut down within weeks. Three thousand people left. The newspaper reported it as a kind of evacuation, which is not far wrong. The buildings remained because buildings cannot leave, and because the men who owned them could not sell them in a market where no one was buying. Philipsburg did not become a ghost town for the same reason that Granite, three miles away, did: it was the county seat. Granite County had been created in 1893, the same year as the crash, with Philipsburg as the administrative center, and county governments do not move just because the silver price drops. The courthouse kept the lawyers and the clerks and the county commissioners in place, and the lawyers and clerks and commissioners kept the hotels and the stores and the churches in business, at a reduced scale.

The sapphire deposits helped. The Yogo Gulch sapphires, discovered in 1895 in Judith Basin County to the north, were the famous ones, but Granite County had its own deposits in the Sapphire Range to the south, and the gem trade provided a modest but steady income stream through the lean years. The sapphires were not silver, but they were something, and something was enough to keep the town alive.

The manganese boom during the First World War provided another interval of prosperity. Granite County turned out to be one of the largest domestic suppliers of manganese in the United States, and the wartime demand for steel hardening agents drove the price from three dollars a ton to forty dollars and beyond. Men who had been waiting for the next boom found it in a metal nobody had thought to value before the war cut off the foreign supply. The Courtney brothers built their hotel in 1918 on manganese profits, and the building still stands at the corner of South Sansome and West Stockton.

Philip Deidesheimer, who gave the town its name and its first serious mining operation, died in San Francisco on July 21, 1916, at the age of eighty-four. He had spent his later years consulting on various projects, including a water system at Lake Tahoe, and he had accumulated a real estate fortune in San Francisco that the 1906 earthquake and fire destroyed. He died destitute. The square-set timbering system he invented without patenting was still in use in mines around the world on the day he died, and would remain in use for decades afterward. The town named for him was still standing. The silver that had brought him here was long gone.

See also

• Philipsburg at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 1985)
• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Ruby Shaft at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)