Golden Girls Antiques Mall

The booths at Golden Girls Antiques Mall go by letters and numbers. In September 2026 the mall’s Facebook page sent shoppers to Booth AZB for new arrivals, to Booth M and Booth SHM for fresh finds, to Booth 8cp for a set table, and upstairs to Booth 9 for vintage dresses and gowns. The same weeks turned up an antique rocking horse, a vintage carriage, a pair of puppy pillows, and a Heywood Wakefield table of oak and wicker. Deleah, who writes the posts, puts up her top picks every week, “Not in any particular order of course!”

The mall fills 10,000 square feet on two floors at 505 North Last Chance Gulch. Its own site describes the gulch as “once a bustling mining town in the 1800s.” The mall counts more than fifty dealers, and the Visit Montana listing says more than forty. Their stock runs to glassware, furniture, art, jewelry, tools, and vintage clothing. Nathan, a reviewer quoted on the mall’s site, came for vintage tools and fishing gear and wrote that “the gals there helped me find what I was looking for and I was lost in there for nearly an hour.”

A goldsmith among the booths

One of the mall’s spaces belongs to a goldsmith. Tim Borsberry, a Helena native, had kept a jewelry shop at Golden Girls for 18 years when the Livingston Enterprise profiled him in May 2026. He creates and repairs jewelry there. Anthoini, another reviewer on the mall’s site, sent engagement-ring shoppers his way: “talk to Tim!” Away from the bench, Borsberry plays drums in three bands. They are Under the Bleachers, the Grateful Dead tribute band 710 Ashbury, and Three Eyed Jack, which plays classic rock and outlaw country. He told the paper he likes the contrast between the two trades. “I get to play the drums and move all my arms and legs around,” he said. When he returns to work, he said, “it’s nice and quiet.”

A Remington Rand 17

In 2012 a Helena wedding photographer named Tyler Knott Gregson was in the store when he spotted an old manual typewriter, a Remington Rand 17. He wanted to check the ribbon, so he tore the title page from a decaying old book he had with him and fed it into the carriage. On the blank part of the page he typed a poem. He told Ed Kemmick of Last Best News in 2014 that he loved at once that the machine had no delete button. “I knew right there I kind of stumbled onto something I really, really loved and wanted to keep doing,” he said.

After that he typed a poem every day on whatever scraps came his way: boarding passes, receipts, library cards. These became the Typewriter Series. The poems drew followers by the thousands and then by the tens of thousands. In time they became a book, Chasers of the Light: Poems from the Typewriter Series, published September 2, 2014, by Penguin Random House’s Perigee imprint.

The Rock Star Antique Dealer

The woman who owned the mall then was Carroll Ann Day. She was born September 3, 1959, in Washington, Pennsylvania. The mall’s site says she learned to love antiques and vintage clothing as a child, shopping with her mother in Pennsylvania and Arizona. She graduated from Camelback High School in Phoenix in 1977 and attended the Parsons School of Design in New York.

Her obituary says she worked for a national retailer in Tucson. She arrived in Helena on her birthday in 2000 to manage its local outlet before she “took on the challenge of owning and managing an antique store.” The business was already established when she bought it. The mall’s site gives the date as September 2002, and her obituary gives September 15, 2003.

The obituary says many knew her as “The Rock Star Antique Dealer.” She embroidered pillows in antique-looking designs. Carol Westine, who worked with her at the mall, recalled that she often donated them to charity auctions. Linda L. Hoenigsberg remembered her warm welcome from the days she rented a booth there. Melba “Mel” Castles, who owned Melo-times antiques, volunteered at the mall; she died December 27, 2018, at 92. In the Independent Record’s Best of Helena voting for 2014, Golden Girls took first place for Best Antique Store.

Day died of complications from glioblastoma on April 18, 2019, at 59. Some weeks earlier the store’s cat, Copper, had made a break out the front door and gone missing. A resident of Jefferson City found him roving beside the highway and cared for him until learning where he came from. He returned to the store the day after Day died. “It is clear to us that Carroll made certain Mr. Copper found his way home, again,” the obituary reads. Kori Dee, who enjoyed her chats with Day at the shop, wrote on the funeral home’s memorial page: “Carroll plus Copper equals Golden Girls Antiques’ welcoming ambiance.”

UPS Dave

“The store will remain open and thriving as usual,” the obituary said. That same year Day’s good friend Dave Burningham took full ownership as a promise to keep her dream alive. He is known as “UPS Dave” and has lived in Helena more than 45 years.

On April 28, 2019, ten days after Day’s death, the Independent Record listed Golden Girls among seven shops in the new Helena Vintage & Resale Collaboration. The group printed a map to send shoppers from one store to the next and set a Mother’s Day Shop Hop for Saturday, May 4, 2019.

During the pandemic the mall shut for seven weeks, KTVH reported. It came back to a steady increase in people looking for preowned goods and wanting to shop locally. “The challenges of COVID have been just a monster and shopping local keeps us a community,” Burningham told the station. Sally Orlando, a frequent shopper who was then 75, said she visits antique shops to revisit memories of the past. She had noticed “younger folks nowadays who seem to appreciate more things from the past.” “Because this is worth hanging onto and it’s worth making sure it lasts,” she said.