L.O. Evans Residence

L.O. Evans Residence, 849 W. Galena The Evans residence, designed by architect W.A. O’Brien and built in 1906, is one of few houses in Butte built of stone. The first-floor walls are of granite laid in a fieldstone (random shapes) pattern. The Evans residence contrasts with the walls of another stone residence, the Hight residence at 117 N. Excelsior. There, the stone (aplite) is laid in a random ashlar pattern (stones are all rectangular, but of different sizes and shapes). Source: Fred Quivik, July 2025

L.O. Evans was a long-time attorney with ACM. He was born Lewis Orvis Evans in 1871 in Utica, New York. In 1883, he moved with his family to Helena, where he graduated from Helena High School in 1887.

In an era when many lawyers entered the profession by studying in a law office, he went to work in the Helena firm of Word and Smith. Evans was admitted to the practice of law in 1894. Prominent Butte attorney John F. Forbis had met Evans on visits to the Word and Smith firm, so he offered Evans a job. The two soon formed the firm Forbis and Evans in Butte, often representing mining companies, including the Butte & Boston and the Boston & Montana, in litigation over mining rights. When the Hennessy Building was built in 1899, Forbis and Evans moved their offices to the sixth floor and began representing Amalgamated subsidiaries. During the first decade of the twentieth century, Evans joined Con Kelley and other attorneys in representing the Amalgamated companies in the litigation against F. Augustus Heinze and in litigation against farmers who had filed complaints against the mining companies whose tailings and smelter smoke were damaging crops and soils in the Deer Lodge Valley. When all the Amalgamated companies’ operations were transferred to ACM in 1910, Evens joined ACM’s legal department. He was named chief counsel for ACM in 1914 and general counsel in 1920. He was still serving as ACM’s general counsel when he died in 1931.

W.A. O’Brien, architect of Kelley’s mansion on West Park, also designed Evans’ house at the northeast corner of Galena and Excelsior (849 W. Galena), built in 1906. Prior to building his own house, Evans rented living quarters elsewhere in Butte, including at the Lenox on West Granite, where a number of other ACM officials lived in the late nineteen and early twentieth centuries. In the four years before his house was completed, Evans lived in a small apartment at the southwest corner of Broadway and Alabama, which is across Broadway from the A.J. Campbell residence, another of W.A. O’Brien designs. A native of Massachusetts, O’Brien lived in Butte for 56 years before he died in June 1940. During that time, he designed many prominent residences and important buildings, and he served as the architect for the Butte School Board for 18 years.

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Several ACM attorneys eventually built grand houses in Butte. Another was D. Gay Stivers, who built a house at 1251West Platinum in 1923. Stivers was born in 1869 in Texas, where his father had enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War. After a brief effort to train for the military, young Stivers moved to Butte, where he worked as a stenographer for the Anaconda Gold & Silver Mining Company in 1889. When W.W. Dixon was elected to represent Montana in the U.S House of Representatives in 1890, Stivers moved to Washington, DC, with Dixon to work as his secretary. Dixon was defeated in the 1892 election and returned to Butte, and Stivers followed, working in Dixon’s law office on the second floor of the Chambers Block. While in the nation’s capital, Stivers had studied at law school, and he continued those studies in Dixon’s office. He was admitted to the bar in Montana in 1895. Like Con Kelley, he served briefly as a deputy county attorney for Silver Bow County, and then he went to work as an ACM attorney on the sixth floor of the Hennessy Building when that building was completed in 1899. From that position, he played a central role in Amalgamated’s litigation against F. Augustus Heinze. As is well known, the legal battles between Heinze and Amalgamated were quite heated, and in the midst of those proceedings, Stivers gained notoriety when he and fellow ACM attorney A.J. Shores fled Montana to avoid a disbarment hearing. In the aftermath of the lynching of Frank Little in 1917, Stivers, still an ACM attorney, was often accused of knowing who the perpetrators were. And during the strike in 1920, Stivers was integral to the company’s campaign to defeat the strike. When Stivers died in 1942, he was mainly honored for his military service in the Spanish-American War and the First World War.