Invitation to the Montana Club's Tenth Annual Smoker event, designed with Albert Raleigh

Robert C. Reamer

The Montana Club was founded in 1885 by a group of fifty businessmen-- who led the westward movement in timber, mining, and agriculture, as well as banking and transportation-- for "literary, mutual improvement, and social purposes". Meeting at various places for the first seven years, the members, whose numbers had by then grown to around 300, purchased a triangular plot of land at Sixth and Fuller in Helena, Montana in the early 1890s. They commissioned the architects John C. Paulsen and John LaValle to design something that would accommodate their needs, and an elegant, flat-iron shaped Gothic structure was built on the plot by architects in 1893.

In 1903, however, the stone and wood structure set on fire by the bartender's 14-year-old son (who was promptly sent to a reform school). The bottom floor was gutted. A new design, now in terracotta and with a simpler silhouette, was drawn up by famed architect Cass Gilbert, and built in the footprint of the former structure. Portions of the former structure's upper floor remain. In this piece, the latter version of the building, lit from within, is pictured with a large full moon and cobalt night sky, a classic Montana night scene.