Hotel-Apartments Rented by Top ACM Officials
Many of the men who worked in high-level positions for ACM lived in hotels, at least for the first few years they were in Butte. Some of those individuals eventually built houses, while others continued to rent rooms during their entire time in Butte.
One of the fancy accommodations that housed prominent ACM officials was the Leonard Hotel. Designed by architect W.A. O’Brien, when it opened in 1906, it was touted as one of the most fashionable places to live in Butte. Accommodations ranged from single rooms to suites. There was a spacious lobby, and a café in the basement. Among the prominent ACM officials who lived in the Leonard were geologist Reno Sales, who lived there for three years before building his house at 954 Caledonia, and attorney William Scallon, who served as president of ACM from 1900, when Marcus Daly died, until 1904, when he resigned and returned to being an ACM attorney. He moved into the Leonard when it opened in 1906, and Sales moved to the Leonard a year later.
The Lenox Hotel and the Beresford Block were both popular abodes for ACM officials. Built in 1897, the Lenox was on the south side of West Granite just west of the Butte Water Company building (formerly the Independent Telephone Company). Con Kelley and L.O. Evans both lived in the Lenox in 1903, and Horace Winchell lived there from 1901 to 1903. The Beresford, once across Quartz Street from the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, was built in the early 1890s. William Scallon lived there in 1893.
Another prominent building for housing ACM officials was the Kingsbury, once located at the site of the Archives parking lot on the northwest corner of Quartz and Main. This made the Kingsbury a convenient place for Anaconda officials to live when offices of the company were located on the upper floors of the Chambers Block and the Tuttle Block. Marcus Daly, engineer Charles Goodale, and attorney D. Gay Stivers all lived in the Kingsbury. Like the Tuttle Block, the Kingsbury (built in 1882) was originally a two-story building, and a third floor was added in about 1890 or 1891. It had store fronts on the ground floor and offices and sleeping rooms for rent on the upper floors.
Unlike John D. Ryan and Con Kelley, early ACM presidents who owned mansions on Butte’s West Side, Benjamin B. Thayer, who was ACM president for seven years, never owned his own house in Butte (nor did Marcus Daly). Thayer was born in San Francisco in 1862. He graduated in 1885 from Harvard University, where he was a classmate of William Randolph Hearst, George and Phoebe Hearst’s son. After graduating, he moved to Butte to pursue a career as a mining engineer. His first job in Butte was as a miner in the Anaconda mine. After being promoted to shift boss and then foreman, he moved to Phillipsburg, MT, and the Coeur d’Alene mining district in Idaho for a few years to work in the mining industry. He then began to work for Phoebe Hearst representing the Hearst estate’s mining interest. In the early twentieth century, he worked for Amalgamated as assistant to H.H. Rogers and soon became vice president of ACM. He served as ACM president from 1908 to 1915 and again as vice president until his death in 1933. During his long service with ACM, he also served as an officer of numerous ACM subsidiaries. He lived on the top floor of the Silver Bow Club until he moved to New York in 1916.
Foremost among the ACM attorneys who never owned a dwelling in Butte was W.W. Dixon. William Wirt Dixon was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1838 and gradually moved westward, studying law in Keokuk, Iowa, and arriving in California in 1862. He then moved to Nevada, Helena, Deer Lodge, and the Black Hills before arriving in Butte in 1881. He established a law practice and began to provide legal counsel to Marcus Daly and J.B. Haggin as they launched their Anaconda enterprise. With his law offices first in the Chambers Block and then the Tuttle Block, he was instrumental in helping to incorporate the 1891 Anaconda Mining Company and the 1895 Anaconda Copper Mining Company. When the Hennessy Building was completed in 1899, he moved his office to the sixth floor and took the title of ACM attorney. He died in 1910 in Los Angeles, where he had been living for two years. While living and working in Butte, he moved from one rental abode to another, ending his time in Butte at the Dorothy Block at the northeast corner of Granite and Wyoming.
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