Schuh-Nowak Residence

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, Summer 1894

The house at 203 Franklin Street is built of salmon-colored brick, which is not a color you see often in Montana, where the preferred building materials tend toward gray stone, weathered wood, and the kind of optimism that runs out before the second winter. Salmon brick in Philipsburg in 1894 was a choice, and it was the choice of a woman named Mary Schuh, who had been making choices in this part of Montana since before most of her neighbors had arrived.

Mary Schuh was, by local reputation, the first white woman to settle in Cable, the silver mining camp that sat in the mountains a few miles from Philipsburg. Cable was a hard place to be first at anything. The mines there pulled silver out of the rock in the 1880s and 1890s, and the men who worked them lived the way men in hard-rock mines have always lived: in boarding houses, in tents, in whatever shelter could be assembled before the next shift started. A woman who chose to homestead near Cable in those years was not making a sentimental decision. She was making a practical one, and she was making it with the understanding that the practical decisions in a mining camp were the ones that kept you alive.

By 1894, Mary Schuh owned the property on Franklin Street in Philipsburg proper, and she built on it in the Queen Anne style that was then at the height of its fashion. The house is two and a half stories, with a pedimented gable embellished in a way that the marker inscription calls "beautifully embellished" -- which is the kind of phrase that appears on historical markers when the people who wrote it ran out of more specific words. What it means is that the carpenter who built the gable knew his trade and was given the materials to show it. The open porch has a spindled balustrade, turned columns, and decorative details that would have looked at home in any prosperous town in the country in 1894, which was precisely the point. Philipsburg in the early 1890s was a prosperous town. The Granite Mountain Mine up the road was producing two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in silver. The streets were full of men with wages in their pockets, and the merchants and homesteaders who served them were building accordingly.

Then came November 1893, and the repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, and the price of silver fell off a cliff. The three thousand people who lived in Granite, the company town above Philipsburg, left in twenty-four hours. The Bi-Metallic Mine, which had been the engine of the whole valley's economy, shut down and stayed shut. The salmon-colored house on Franklin Street was already built by then, or nearly so, and Mary Schuh was already in it, and she stayed.

Her daughter Emma married Frank Nowak, and the Nowaks raised their children in the house on Franklin Street through the lean years that followed the silver crash. The boarding houses emptied out. The furniture stores and feed stores and dry goods emporiums that had done business on Broadway during the boom years either closed or contracted to a fraction of their former size. The Bi-Metallic Mine reopened in a smaller way in the late 1890s, and Philipsburg survived, but it survived as a smaller town than it had been, and the salmon-colored house on Franklin Street was a reminder of the years when it had been larger.

Mary Schuh died in 1918. Emma and Frank Nowak sold the house shortly after. The house changed hands several times in the decades that followed, and at some point the cedar roof shingles were replaced with something less period-appropriate, and the handcut metal ridge trim that runs along the roofline was allowed to deteriorate. The restoration that the marker describes -- new cedar shingling of the original type, restoration of the unusual handcut metal ridge trim -- returned the house to what it had looked like when Mary Schuh first moved in, which is to say it returned it to the salmon-colored optimism of a woman who had homesteaded near a silver mine and then built herself a Queen Anne house in town when the mine started paying.

The ridge trim is the detail worth pausing on. It is described as "unusual" and "handcut," which means someone made it by hand for this specific house, which means it was not ordered from a catalog or cut by a machine in a factory somewhere east of the Mississippi. Someone in Philipsburg in the mid-1890s sat down with metal and tools and cut a decorative trim for the roofline of a house on Franklin Street, and that trim is still there, restored to its original condition. Mary Schuh's house is still salmon-colored. The porch columns are still turned. The pedimented gable is still embellished.

The Granite Mountain Mine is a ghost town now, and the three thousand people who left in twenty-four hours in November 1893 never came back. But the house on Franklin Street is still standing, and it is still the color of a choice made by a woman who had been first at harder things than building a house.

See also

• Schuh-Nowak Residence at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2022)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the silver boom town whose collapse defined the economic context in which the Schuh-Nowak house was built