The Moss Mansion: A Vermont Banker Builds His Monument

Preston Boyd Moss arrived in Billings in eighteen ninety-two, passing through on his way from Missouri to Butte. He looked at what the railroad had built in the decade since the city's founding and decided to stay. Within a few years he had taken control of the First National Bank of Billings and was working his way into dozens of other ventures, telephone exchanges, irrigation projects, agriculture, publishing. He would eventually participate in at least sixty separate businesses.

When it came time to build a house, Moss chose the finest New York architect he could find. Henry Janeway Hardenbergh had designed the Waldorf-Astoria and the Plaza Hotel. For the Moss family, he designed a red-sandstone mansion at Nine-fourteen Division Street that cost one hundred five thousand dollars to build in nineteen oh three, at a time when most houses in the area went up for around five thousand dollars. The interior was decorated by a firm from Chicago. The fireplaces, the woodwork, the Moorish room on the upper floor, nothing was modest.

The Moss family occupied the house for more than eighty years. Melville Moss, one of Preston's daughters, was the last resident, and when she died in nineteen eighty-four, the property passed to the city of Billings and the state of Montana. Today it operates as a house museum listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

What you are looking at when you drive past is not simply a rich man's vanity project. It is a snapshot of what Billings was becoming in the first decade of the twentieth century, a city confident enough in its own future to import the best architects in the country.