St. Peter's Cathedral: Helena's Gothic Anchor
Near Helena, Montana
Episcopal Bishop Daniel Sylvester Tuttle held the first Protestant services in Helena in August of eighteen sixty-seven, in a courthouse, in a mining boomtown that had been founded just three years earlier. By March of eighteen sixty-nine he had organized a formal mission and paid twelve hundred dollars for land, then spent twelve thousand dollars on a stone church with a bell tower. The congregation outgrew it.
In nineteen thirty-one, architect Harold Whitehouse broke ground on the current cathedral in Gothic Revival style. It was completed in nineteen thirty-two at a cost of ninety thousand dollars and became the seat of the Episcopal Diocese of Montana. The cathedral sits on a hill above Last Chance Gulch, the Helena creek where placer gold was discovered in eighteen sixty-four and touched off the rush that built the city below it.
