Philipsburg

Masonry on Broadway

On Broadway in Philipsburg, masonry blocks of the 1880s and 1890s stand where the wooden false-front buildings of the mining camp days once stood.^3,6 The town is the county seat of Granite County, in western Montana, and counted 1138 residents in 1980.² After the World War I manganese boom, Philipsburg slipped into a stable existence based on agriculture, government, logging, limited mining, and tourism.³

Deidesheimer’s Townsite on Flint Creek

Silver was discovered south of the present town in 1864, and the first claims were staked in 1865.^3,7 Early in the summer of 1866 one of the locators, Hector Horton, interested James Stuart and the St. Louis and Montana Mining Company in a prospecting trip, and a silver rush followed on the Hope, Algonquin, Speckled Trout, and other lodes.⁷ In 1866 the Polish-born merchant William Weinstein came around the mountain from the mining camp of Cable with a wagon-load of goods and became Philipsburg’s first general merchant.⁸ Philipp Deidesheimer, known from the Comstock, arrived in 1866 and evaluated the district for the St. Louis and Montana Mining Company.⁷ In the spring of 1867 Deidesheimer built a wagon road up Flint Creek, and on June 15 of that year the townsite was laid out.² An area newspaper reported the town growing at the “rate of one house per day,” and by December 1867 it held about 1500 people.^2,3 The town carries Deidesheimer’s name; the 1939 Federal Writers’ Project guide calls him Philip Deidesheimer, superintendent of a silver-mining company, and dates the settlement to 1866, while a University of Montana column names him Peter Deiesheimer.^1,5,7

The Hope Mill and the Empty Town

In 1867 Deidesheimer supervised construction of the Hope Mill, which the 1939 guide describes as a ten-stamp silver mill built to handle the free-milling ores from the Hope Mine.^1,7 The same guide calls it the first silver mill in Montana and says it served as a fort during Indian troubles.¹ The Hope operated only intermittently, and by 1869, when it was temporarily shut down, most of the residents had left town.² Honora Hynes ran a two-and-one-half-story frame boardinghouse built in 1880 until the silver crash of 1893, and a marker calls it the last-remaining frame boardinghouse in a town whose wooden commercial buildings were mostly rebuilt in brick.⁹

Granite Mountain and the Railroad

Charles McLure, superintendent of the Hope Mill, took a lease and option on the Granite Mountain property in 1880 and formed a syndicate of St. Louis investors.⁷ At about 200 feet of depth the miners struck bonanza silver ore.⁷ The Granite Mountain and the Bi-Metallic worked the same orebody, first located in 1872, and from 1885 to 1893 the Granite Mountain produced $20 million in silver while the Bi-Metallic produced $6 million from 1883 to 1893.⁷ The Mining History Association calls Granite, 2 ½ miles southeast of Philipsburg, the greatest silver bonanza in the world in its time.⁷ Until 1887 five stage lines ran between Philipsburg and Granite, and on September 15 of that year the Philipsburg branch of the Northern Pacific Railroad arrived.² Houses went up in a five-year rush between 1887 and 1891, and by 1887 the town had three brick yards operating “full force.”² Doe and Hoyer put up a brick building in 1887 whose drug store, run by M. E. Doe and his sons until 1969, sold the town’s first gasoline, hand pumped from barrels out front.⁶

Panic, Sapphires, and Manganese

The Panic of 1893 sharply curtailed the town’s growth, as 400 miners in Philipsburg and Granite were laid off and Granite, with its 2,500 residents, became a ghost town overnight.² Sapphires found in Rock Creek in 1892 helped stabilize the local economy, and the first small round stones were shipped to Switzerland for watch bearings.^3,5 Granite County was created in 1893 with Philipsburg as its seat, and Colonel J. W. Morse’s lecture hall of 1887 served as the county courthouse.^3,9 The Philipsburg Grade School, designed by Bell and Kent and financed by a $30,000 bond, was dedicated in 1896, and two hundred students attended its first year.¹⁰ The first permanent home for Granite County offices, designed by John Link and Charles Haire and cut from Montana granite, was completed in 1913.⁹ The Philipsburg Mining Co. began mining manganese at the Algonquin mine in 1916, by 1918 the town had shipped 127,415 tons of high-grade ore, and the historic district’s register entry calls Philipsburg the largest supplier of domestic manganese during World War I.^2,3 With manganese profits, brothers Morris and Humphrey Courtney built a building in 1918 whose basement held the Granite County Garage and whose first floor sold Overland automobiles, and in 1991 the Granite County Museum & Cultural Center was founded in the Courtney Hotel.^9,11,12 The Philipsburg State Bank failed in 1924, two mills burned in 1925 and were not rebuilt, and by 1930, the nomination says, the town “seems to have settled into a stable but limited existence.”² In 1939 the Federal Writers’ Project guide found a silver town of 1,355 whose mines also produced manganese, where “luxurious automobiles” stopped before very simple houses.¹ Weinstein’s store building, later a bank and a mortuary, has held mining company offices for the Taylor-Knapp Company since 1950.⁸