Superior School

Superior, Mineral County, Montana, 1869-1995

The gold ran out. The town did not.

That is the short version of Superior's history, and it is unusual enough to be worth examining. In the mountains of western Montana, the standard story goes the other way: gold is found, men pour in, a town springs up overnight, the gold plays out, and the men leave. The town becomes a ghost. The buildings fall. The forest comes back. There are a hundred such places in Montana, and their names -- Garnet, Granite, Marysville, Bannack -- are famous precisely because they are empty.

Superior is not empty. It is the county seat of Mineral County, and it has been continuously inhabited since 1869, and it has a school building from 1916 that is on the National Register of Historic Places, and the reason for all of this is that the people who came for the gold stayed for something else.

The Cedar Creek Rush

Louis Barrette was a French-Canadian prospector who had been working the Idaho gold fields without much luck when, in the fall of 1868, he spotted a basin on the Montana side of the Coeur d'Alene Mountains that looked promising to his gold prospector's eye. He resolved to return in the fall of 1869, and he did, climbing into the steep cedar-crowded gulch with his partner Basil Lanthier and enough supplies to last several weeks. On October 9, 1869, at the mouth of Cayuse Creek, they found gold.

They tried to keep it quiet. They did not succeed. By late November the news had slipped from the lips of a man named Lozeau who had been sent to Frenchtown for supplies, and the rush was on. The Missoula newspaper reported that "Hotel keepers, merchants, clerks, idle men and loafers, all are gone..." -- all of them headed up the gulch with packs and gumboots and the particular fever that gold discovery produces in men who have been waiting for something to happen.

By the summer of 1870, the gulch held anywhere from 1,700 to 2,500 claims. The towns of Louiseville, Cedar Junction, Mugginsville, and Lincoln City had been laid out in the ravine. Hurdy-gurdy houses and gambling dens and four competing banks occupied the main street. The census of 1870 recorded the miners' personal property at $340,000 -- and miners are known to be tight-lipped about their yields, so the actual amount was probably higher.

The placer gold played out within a decade. The camps in the upper gulch became ghost towns. The men who had come for the gold left for the next strike.

But some of them stayed.

What Stayed

The men who stayed were the ones who had found something more durable than placer gold: a valley with good timber, a river with adequate water, and a railroad coming through. The Northern Pacific reached this part of the Clark Fork valley in the 1880s, and the town of Superior -- named for the quality of the local timber, or possibly for Lake Superior, depending on which account you believe -- grew up along the tracks at the point where the Mullan Road crossed the river.

The Mullan Road was the reason the valley had been accessible at all. Captain John Mullan had built his military road from Fort Walla Walla to Fort Benton between 1859 and 1862, the first wagon road over the Rocky Mountains, and it ran directly through what would become Superior. The road brought the prospectors in 1869. It brought the settlers who followed them. It brought the merchants and the ranchers and the families who decided that this valley, with its timber and its river and its railroad, was a reasonable place to put down roots.

By 1891, there were enough children in the vicinity to organize a school district. Elementary classes were held in a small log cabin. By 1892, there were ninety school-age children in the area, and the log cabin was not adequate. Several rural schools were built to accommodate the overflow, but none of them offered a high school curriculum. Older students who wanted to advance beyond the primary grades had to leave home to do it.

The High School

Mineral County was organized in 1914, carved out of the eastern end of Missoula County. A year later, the new county's voters passed a bond issue for the construction of a high school. The fall of 1915 saw a secondary curriculum offered for the first time, with classes held in the basement of the Methodist Church while the new building went up.

The new high school was constructed by local builder Charles Augustine at a cost of $10,000 and dedicated on January 28, 1916. It was a Colonial Revival building -- a style that was already somewhat old-fashioned by 1916, but which carried the right associations for a school: order, symmetry, the suggestion of New England academies and the classical tradition. The three-stage bell tower rose above the center of the facade. Flanking dormers broke the roofline on either side. The strict classical symmetry of the design was, in a town that had been built from rough timber and railroad iron, a deliberate statement about what the community intended to be.

Additions in 1925 and 1947 eased overcrowding as the county grew. The school remained in use until June 1995 -- eighty years of continuous operation, from the first students who had ridden in from ranches across Mineral County to take classes in the Methodist Church basement to the last graduating class that walked across the stage under the bell tower.

What the Building Means

The Superior School building is one of Montana's few surviving examples of Colonial Revival school architecture. It stands at the center of town, next to the Mineral County courthouse, and it is still the most prominent building in Superior -- more prominent, in fact, than it was in 1916, because most of the buildings that once surrounded it have been replaced or removed.

The marker that the Montana Historical Society placed at the school makes a point that is easy to overlook: the building "has always drawn visitors to the center of town." This is not a small thing. In a county where the gold camps became ghost towns and the timber industry contracted and the population never grew very large, the school was the institution that kept the community coherent. It was where the children of ranchers and miners and railroad workers and merchants came together, year after year, and learned what they needed to know to stay or to leave or to come back.

The gold ran out in 1879 or thereabouts. The school ran until 1995. The town is still there.

See also

• Cedar Creek Gold Rush, Mineral County Historical Society, 1987 (John Wilkinson Leland Baseline narrative)
• Mullan Road history, Montana Historical Society
• Mineral County courthouse (adjacent landmark)
• Superior School Building, National Register of Historic Places (listed 1991)
• Montana Historical Society marker, erected by Montana Historical Society