Moss Mansion: Billings Goes Gilded

In nineteen oh three, a banker named Preston Boyd Moss hired the most fashionable architect in New York City to build him a house in Billings, Montana. The result is a twenty-eight-room red sandstone mansion that still stands on Division Street, furnishings intact, looking like it was lifted from a Manhattan brownstone and set down on the edge of the northern plains.

Moss arrived in Billings in eighteen ninety-two, passing through from Missouri on his way to Butte. The town's commercial energy made him stop. He took control of the First National Bank of Billings, assembled a portfolio that stretched from ranching to irrigation projects to newspaper ownership, and became one of the largest investors in the young state of Montana. By the early nineteen hundreds he was ready to build a home that announced what Billings had become.

His architect was Henry Janeway Hardenbergh, who had already designed the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the Plaza Hotel, and The Dakota apartment building, all in New York. Moss asked for an English Renaissance home. Hardenbergh delivered mahogany and walnut woodwork throughout, an onyx fireplace, rose silk and gold leaf wall coverings, stained glass windows, and a three-story layout on two acres of land. The total cost for construction and furnishings was one hundred five thousand dollars, a figure that would be roughly three million dollars today.

Moss, his wife Martha, their six children, the grandparents, and a staff of three lived in the house from its completion until the family eventually stepped back in the nineteen eighties. Almost nothing was removed. The Billings Preservation Society took over the mansion in nineteen eighty-six and opened it as a museum. When you tour the interior today, you are walking through the possessions of a single family, accumulated over eighty years, in a house built to announce that the American West had graduated from a frontier into a place of settled wealth and civic ambition.