Walker Commercial Building

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, April 2026

A.J. Gibson was a Missoula architect who understood something that most people in the mining West preferred not to think about: the mines would eventually close, but the buildings would remain. When the Walker Company hired him in 1905 to design a commercial building on East Broadway in Philipsburg, the silver mines at Granite had already been closed for twelve years. The town of Granite, three miles up the mountain, had gone from three thousand people to a handful of caretakers in a single season. Philipsburg itself had survived the crash of 1893 better than most mining towns, partly because it was the county seat and partly because it had a more diversified economy, but the memory of what had happened up the hill was fresh enough that any man putting up a permanent building in 1905 was making a statement about his confidence in the future.

Gibson made that statement in brick and polished granite and cast iron. The Walker Commercial Building at 109 East Broadway is two stories tall, with a metal modillioned cornice across the top, decorative panels below the cornice, and a full-height glass storefront at street level. The skirt below the storefront is polished granite, which is an appropriate material for a building in Granite County, and which also happens to be extremely durable. The design is not flashy. It is the design of a man who expected the building to be there in fifty years and wanted it to look like it belonged.

The Walker Company was a dry goods and hardware operation with stores in both Philipsburg and the ghost town of Granite. The Granite store served the miners who were still working the mountain in the years after the 1893 crash, when the mines were being worked on a reduced scale by smaller operators picking over what the Granite Mountain Mining Company had left behind. The Philipsburg store served the county seat and the ranching community that had grown up in the Flint Creek Valley as the mining economy contracted. The Walker Company was, in other words, a business that had learned to operate in both the boom and the aftermath of the boom, which is a skill that not many businesses in the mining West ever acquired.

The building Gibson designed for the Walker Company was part of a larger project of civic permanence that was underway in Philipsburg in the early 1900s. The Granite County Courthouse, designed by the Missoula firm of Link and Haire, went up in 1913. The Masonic Temple went up in 1911. These were not the buildings of a town that expected to disappear. They were the buildings of a town that had decided to stay, and that was willing to invest in stone and brick and cast iron to prove it.

The Walker Company eventually gave way to the Golden Rule, which handled similar dry goods and hardware merchandise at the same location in the 1920s. The Golden Rule gave way to Philipsburg Hardware in 1932, which carried on the same tradition of selling the things that ranchers and miners and townspeople needed to keep their operations running. The building changed hands and changed tenants, but it did not change its essential character. It remained what Gibson had designed it to be: a permanent commercial structure on the main street of a town that intended to remain a town.

There is a photograph of East Broadway in Philipsburg taken around 1895, before the Walker Building was constructed. The street is unpaved. The buildings on either side are mostly frame construction, the kind of buildings that go up quickly in a mining camp and come down just as quickly when the camp empties. By 1905, when Gibson was designing the Walker Building, some of those frame buildings had already been replaced by brick, and the street was beginning to look like the main street of a permanent town rather than a temporary encampment. The Walker Building was part of that transformation, and it is still standing.

The polished granite skirt at the base of the storefront is worth examining if you happen to be standing in front of the building. Granite is a hard rock, resistant to weathering, and the polish has held up reasonably well over the century since Gibson specified it. The granite came from somewhere in the region, possibly from the same mountains that gave the county its name. The men who cut and polished it were craftsmen working in a tradition that went back centuries, and they did their work well. The building is listed in the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Philipsburg Historic District, which means that someone has officially decided it is worth preserving. Gibson would have considered that the minimum.

The Walker Company is gone. The Golden Rule is gone. Philipsburg Hardware is gone. The building remains.

See also

• Walker Commercial Building at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2005)
• Granite Ghost Town at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the silver mining town three miles up the mountain that the Walker Company also served
• Philipsburg at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the broader history of the county seat and its mining heritage