Wilson Brothers Building

By editor

Philipsburg, Granite County, Montana, 1888

Charles A. Wilson and Frank J. Wilson came from Wisconsin to Philipsburg in the middle of the silver boom, which was the right time to come if you were planning to sell things to miners. They built their building at the corner of West Broadway and California Street by 1888, and they divided it the way practical men divide a building: furniture store on one side, feed store on the other, miners' boarding house upstairs. This arrangement addressed three of the four things a man in a mining camp needed, the fourth being whiskey, which was available in quantity on the south side of Broadway and did not require the Wilsons' assistance.

The Granite Mountain Mine was producing two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a month in silver in 1889. The Bi-Metallic Mine was running alongside it. Philipsburg had three thousand people and eighteen saloons and a level of commercial activity that justified a furniture store and a feed store and a boarding house all under one roof. The Wilson brothers were not speculators. They were merchants, which is a different thing. Speculators bet on the price of silver. Merchants bet on the number of people who need furniture and feed and a place to sleep, which is a more reliable bet in a mining town because those needs exist regardless of what the silver market is doing.

The building they put up was solid enough to last. Inside, a hand-over-hand hoist was installed for moving goods between floors, and it is still in use today, which is the kind of detail that stops you when you read it. A hand-over-hand hoist from 1888 is still in use in a building in Philipsburg, Montana. The tongue-and-groove maple flooring is also still there, which the marker notes as confirmation of "the success of the brothers' businesses." What it actually confirms is that the Wilson brothers bought good materials and built to last, which is a different kind of success than the kind that shows up in bank accounts.

A hand-over-hand hoist works on a simple principle: a rope or chain runs over a fixed pulley, and a worker pulls one side down to raise the other side up. It is the same mechanism that has been used to lift things since before recorded history, and it requires no electricity, no hydraulics, and no maintenance beyond keeping the rope sound and the pulley greased. The fact that the one installed in the Wilson Brothers Building in 1888 is still in use means that either the original mechanism has been maintained with unusual care, or it has been replaced with an identical one at some point, or both. Either way, the building still moves goods between floors the way it did when Charles and Frank Wilson were selling furniture and feed to miners.

Then came November 1893. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act was repealed, the price of silver fell by half, and three thousand people left Granite in twenty-four hours. The furniture store and the feed store and the boarding house upstairs suddenly had fewer customers. The Wilsons adapted. By the 1890s, the businesses had changed to hardware and groceries, which are things people need in a smaller town as much as in a larger one. The boarding house continued to operate upstairs. The building stayed open.

Hardware and groceries are not as glamorous as furniture and feed, but they are more essential. A man can sleep on the floor if he has no furniture, but he cannot eat without groceries, and he cannot fix his roof without hardware. The Wilsons understood this, and they stocked accordingly. The building that had served a boom town became the building that served a surviving town, which required a different inventory but the same floor space and the same hoist and the same maple floors.

The building has been remodeled several times since 1888, and at some point the interior stairs were moved to the outside, which is the kind of change that happens when a building's use shifts and the original interior arrangement no longer makes sense. But the facade has been restored to its 1887 appearance, which means the building looks from the street the way it looked when Charles and Frank Wilson first opened for business. The corner of West Broadway and California Street in Philipsburg looks, from the outside, approximately the way it looked in the year Grover Cleveland was first elected president.

The hand-over-hand hoist is the detail that earns the building its place in the historical record. Most of what the Wilson brothers built and sold and stored in that building is gone. The furniture they sold is in attics and secondhand shops and landfills. The feed they sold was eaten by horses that have been dead for a hundred years. The miners who slept upstairs are buried in the cemetery on the hill above town. But the hoist is still there, still working, still moving things between floors the way it moved them in 1888. The maple floor is still there under the feet of whoever walks across it today.

Charles and Frank Wilson came from Wisconsin to Philipsburg to sell things to miners, and they built a building solid enough that the building is still standing a hundred and thirty-five years later with its original hoist intact. That is a better return on investment than most of the men who came to Philipsburg for the silver ever managed.

See also

• Wilson Brothers Building at Philipsburg, Granite County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2011)
• J.K. Merrill and Sons Dry Goods at Philipsburg, Granite County -- the neighboring commercial building that became the Bi-Metallic Mining company store after the 1893 silver crash