Sayrs' Building

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, 1888

Joseph Hyde came to Philipsburg in the 1880s with money, ambition, and the conviction that the silver boom would last long enough to justify building something permanent. He was a banker, which meant he had a professional obligation to believe in the future, and in 1888 he and his wife Mary put that belief into brick and mortar at the corner of Broadway and Sansome. The building they raised was called the Hyde Block, and it housed the First National Bank of Philipsburg on the ground floor, with offices above. It had a chamfered corner, which is to say the corner was beveled at forty-five degrees rather than squared off, a detail that gave the building a slightly nautical look and made it easier for wagons to turn without clipping the edge. The metal cornice along the roofline was modillioned, meaning it had small bracket-like projections spaced evenly beneath the overhang, which was the Victorian commercial idiom for announcing that the owner had taste and the money to indulge it.

The First National Bank of Philipsburg was not a small operation. 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, and that silver had to go somewhere before it went to the smelter. It went through the banks. The men who ran the mines kept accounts, paid wages, and financed equipment through institutions like Hyde's, and the banker who held those accounts was in a position to know, before almost anyone else, how the mine was doing. Joseph Hyde in 1888 would have known that the Granite Mountain was producing at a rate that made his building seem like a modest investment. He would have known the names of the men who were getting rich and the names of the men who were not. He would have known the price of silver in the London market and what it meant for the value of the ore coming out of the ground three miles away.

What he would not have known, or would not have allowed himself to believe, was that the whole arrangement was five years from collapse.

The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in November 1893, and the price of silver fell through the floor and kept falling. The Granite Mountain Mine shut down within weeks. Three thousand people left Philipsburg in what witnesses described as a single day, though the actual exodus took somewhat longer. The First National Bank of Philipsburg did not survive the contraction. Joseph Hyde's conviction about the permanence of the silver boom turned out to be misplaced, as convictions about booms generally do.

The building itself survived, because brick does not care about the price of silver. Frank Sayrs purchased it in 1904, eleven years after the crash, when the price was low enough to make the acquisition sensible. Sayrs had the practical man's approach to commercial real estate: he did not need the building to be what it had been; he needed it to be useful. Under his ownership and the ownership of those who followed him, the Hyde Block became the Sayrs' Building, and it housed a tailor's shop, drug stores, and at various points a recreation center. The chamfered corner and the modillioned cornice remained, because they were structural and decorative features that cost nothing to preserve and would have cost money to remove.

The tailor's shop is worth a moment's consideration. Philipsburg in the early twentieth century was a working town, not a tourist town, and a tailor's shop served the men who worked the sapphire mines and the manganese operations and the county government offices. A tailor in a mining town was not making suits for the opera. He was letting out waistbands, replacing worn elbows, and turning collars on shirts that had been worn until the front was frayed. The economics of tailoring in a small Montana county seat in 1910 were not glamorous, but they were steady, which was more than could be said for the economics of silver banking.

The drug stores that occupied the building at various points in the twentieth century served a similar function. A drugstore in a small Montana county seat in the 1920s and 1930s was a pharmacy, a soda fountain, a place to buy tobacco and newspapers and patent medicines, and, in the years before television, a social gathering point where people stood at the counter and talked about the weather and the price of sapphires and whether the county commissioners were going to fix the road to Drummond. The building accommodated all of this without complaint.

The recreation center that occupied the building at some point in its history is the most interesting of its tenants, because it suggests that the building served a social function that neither the bank nor the tailor's shop had provided. A recreation center in a small Montana town in the mid-twentieth century typically meant a pool hall, a card room, a place where men who were not working could spend time without going home. The building that Joseph Hyde had built to house the First National Bank of Philipsburg had become, in the course of its career, a place where men played cards. Hyde would have found this undignified. Sayrs, who had bought the building for what it could do rather than what it had been, would probably have found it satisfactory.

The Sayrs' Building stands today as one of the contributing structures in the Philipsburg Historic District, which was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of the town's unusually intact collection of late-nineteenth-century commercial architecture. The district exists because Philipsburg did not grow fast enough after 1893 to tear down its old buildings and replace them with new ones. The silver crash that ruined Joseph Hyde's bank preserved his building, which is the kind of irony that Philipsburg's history specializes in.

The chamfered corner is still there. The modillioned cornice is still there. The building is still there. Joseph Hyde is not, and neither is the First National Bank of Philipsburg, and neither is the silver economy that made both of them seem like reasonable propositions. Frank Sayrs, who bought the wreckage and made it useful again, understood something that Hyde perhaps did not: that the building was more durable than the enterprise it housed, and that durability, in the end, was the only investment that paid.

See also

• Sayrs' Building at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2009)
• Philipsburg Historic District at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)
• Walker Commercial Building at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society)