Superintendent's House

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, April 2026

In 1882, the investors who had been financing the Granite Mountain Mine sent word from St. Louis that they were done. They had put money into the mine for years without seeing a return that satisfied them, and they were pulling out. The message was sent by pony express, which is to say it was sent by a man on a horse, because the Pony Express had ceased operations in 1861 and the marker at the site uses the term loosely to mean a mounted courier. The courier was delayed by a blizzard. During the delay, the miners found the bonanza shoot.

The investors' letter arrived after the strike had been made. It was, under the circumstances, irrelevant. The investors who had been ready to quit suddenly found themselves in possession of one of the richest silver mines in the United States, and they did not quit. They built three mills to handle the flood of ore. By 1889, the Granite Mountain and Bi-Metallic Mines were producing between $250,000 and $275,000 per month in silver. One mine alone was producing six thousand pounds of silver and thirteen and a third pounds of gold per week.

The Superintendent's House stood at the head of Magnolia Avenue, which the residents of Granite called Silk Stocking Row. The name was ironic in the way that names in mining towns often are: it acknowledged the existence of a class distinction in a place that was supposed to be a democracy of labor, and it did so with just enough humor to take the edge off. The elite of Granite lived on Silk Stocking Row. The superintendent of the Granite Mountain Mining Company lived in the house at the head of it, which made him the most elite resident of the most elite street in a city of three thousand people at seven thousand feet above sea level.

From 1889 to 1893, that superintendent was a man named Thomas Weir. He was, by the account preserved on the marker, a capable manager who did much to improve living and working conditions for the miners. This is a description that would have been applied to very few mine superintendents in the American West of the 1880s, where the standard approach to labor relations was to pay as little as possible, work the men as hard as possible, and replace them when they wore out. Weir took a different approach. He built a drying house so that miners coming off the thousand-foot shaft into winter cold could dry their clothes before going outside. He built a hospital. He had the bunkhouses cleaned and fumigated. He gave his men one day off a week and paid them $3.50 a day, which was above the standard rate for hard-rock miners in Montana at the time.

The house itself was built with the same attention to permanence that characterized the better buildings in Granite. The first floor housed the superintendent's living quarters. The second floor may have originally housed the mine office, accessible through a door in the back reached by a plank bridgeway from the hillside. There was no inside connection between the two floors, which meant that the superintendent and whoever was working in the mine office above him were in the same building but could not reach each other without going outside. This is either a design oversight or a deliberate arrangement that gave the superintendent some privacy from his own office, and it is impossible at this distance to know which.

By 1892, 3,200 people lived in Granite, with another two thousand or so at the mills nearby. The town had the Miners Union Hall, which was a large and handsome building. It had a library, eighteen saloons, a hospital, a school, and several churches. It had Silk Stocking Row with its superintendent's house at the head. It had everything a city needs except a reason to exist that was independent of the mine.

The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed in November 1893. The mines and mills closed. Three thousand people left Granite in twenty-four hours. Thomas Weir was gone. The investors in St. Louis were gone. The miners who had worked the thousand-foot shaft were gone. The Miners Union Hall eventually collapsed. The bank, the churches, the saloons, and the California House became archaeological sites, their foundations visible in the grass.

The Superintendent's House did not collapse. It was built of stone, and stone does not collapse on the schedule that frame buildings do. Montana State Parks stabilized the structure and maintains it as part of Granite Ghost Town State Park. It stands at the head of Magnolia Avenue, which is no longer Silk Stocking Row because there is no longer anyone on it to wear silk stockings or to notice who does and who does not. The plank bridgeway from the hillside to the second-floor door is gone. The door is still there.

The pony express courier who was delayed by the blizzard in 1882 delivered his letter eventually. The letter said to stop work. By the time it arrived, the bonanza had already been found, and the letter was filed away somewhere and forgotten. The courier's name is not recorded.

See also

• Superintendent's House at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2005)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the full story of the silver city that emptied in a day
• Walker Commercial Building at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the 1905 commercial building that A.J. Gibson designed for a town that intended to stay