The Montana Club: Where the Money Went to Talk
Near Helena, Montana
In eighteen eighty-five, one hundred thirty men, mostly from Montana Territory gathered to form a private club. Their goal was not unusual for the Gilded Age: a place where men of business and politics could dine, drink, and conduct the affairs of the territory away from public scrutiny. What they built was more ambitious than that.
The Montana Club occupied a succession of buildings before its members commissioned a permanent home at the corner of Fuller and Sixth Avenues, completed in nineteen oh five, after fire destroyed the first building. The architect was Cass Gilbert, the same man who later designed the United States Supreme Court building and the Woolworth Building in New York. Helena's club hired him before he was famous, but not before he was good. The resulting building is a Renaissance Revival structure in red brick with terra-cotta ornament, four stories of controlled elegance on a corner that once looked out over the entire city.
The club's membership rolls read like a catalogue of Montana's founding financial and political class. Governors, senators, federal judges, and mining executives ate in its dining room and argued in its library. The club had rules about who could enter, as such clubs always did, and the people excluded from membership built their own parallel institutions in response.
The Montana Club survived booms and busts, survived Prohibition by converting its famous bar to other uses and waiting, and survived the long economic decline of Helena's downtown in the latter half of the twentieth century. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-one.
Today the building still stands at its original corner. The club itself wound down operations over the decades, but the Cass Gilbert structure remains one of the finest commercial buildings in the American West, a monument to the moment when Helena's millionaires believed they were building something permanent.
