Restoring History at the Original Governor's Mansion

Today, over a thousand Montana properties are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Only some of these buildings are open to the public; one that is-and that is of significant interest-is the Original Governor's Mansion in Helena.

The three-story, Queen Anne-style building of "rose red brick" at the corner of Sixth and Ewing Streets was erected in 1888, not for a governor but for William Chessman, an erstwhile miner whose wealth came from a number of profitable Helena businesses. In a prime neighborhood and on a spacious lot, the stately home and its carriage house symbolized the permanence and prosperity enjoyed by the Chessman family and indeed by the city of Helena in the late century. But fortunes failed in the depression of 1893, and William Chessman was forced to sell the house. In 1900, it came into the hands of a wealthy railroad contractor, Peter Larson, who, at considerable expense, made significant changes to both the exterior and interior. Then considered "one of the most beautiful homes in the Treasure State," the house was sold again in 1911." However, the next owner, Great Falls banker Harfield Conrad and his family, lived there for only two years, and in 1913 the mansion was back on the market.

In November 1912, voters elected Samuel V. Stewart governor of Montana. Unlike his predecessors, Stewart was not a resident of the capital city, and to accommodate him, the legislature authorized acquisition of an executive residence. In 1913, the house at 304 North Ewing took on new life as the governor's official home.

Over the next forty-six years, the mansion served as the residence of nine governors and their families.2 Though the governors hosted meetings and formal receptions at the mansion, it was definitely a home rather than a setting for official business. By the late 1950s, however, the house no longer suited the needs of the state's chief executive, and the state built a new executive residence during the tenure of J. Hugo Aronson. The Aronson family moved to a new "modern" home near the State Capitol in 1959.

Following the Aronsons' departure from the old governor's mansion, concerned citizens made an attempt to turn the house into a museum. After those efforts failed, the now-vacant building became state office space in 1965. Changes made to adapt the building to offices destroyed much of the home's historic fabric, and when the last offices moved out in 1968, the mansion was left in a disheveled state.

Once again, citizens mounted efforts to save the historic building. By 1969, a group had convinced the City of Helena to approach the state legislature with a plan to assume a lease on the mansion, restore it, and open it to the public. With the support of the city and other public and private donors, a volunteer board-the Old Governor's Mansion Restoration Committee-devised a plan that called for cleaning up the building's exterior and interior and refurnishing it as a typical home of the 1880s. Helped by private donations, a state appropriation, and federal Model Cities funds, volunteers set about the restoration, room by room, as money became available, with emphasis on the more public rooms on the mansion's first floor.

In 1974, the building opened to public tours even as work on the interior continued. Then, in 1980, the City of Helena decided to give up the lease, and the Montana Historical Society (MHS) assumed administrative responsibility for the house. The volunteer board (now known as the Original Governor's Mansion Restoration Society) continued to secure public support and to raise funds, while the MHS, in the person of curator Mary Hoffschwelle, conducted extensive research on the house. Hoffschwelle's interpretive plan, completed in 1983, laid out in detail the building's history as gleaned from newspapers, state records, photographs, personal papers, oral histories, reminiscences, and architectural and furnishings surveys.

Armed with the information, MHS museum staff began to restore the building to a facsimile of what it had been in the years 1913-21, when Governor Samuel V. Stewart and his family lived there. Restoration started with such major projects as repainting, rewiring, reroofing, updating the plumbing, and installing gutters. Once these projects were completed, attention turned to restoring the interior. During the rewiring, workers had uncovered evidence of tongue-and-groove wainscoting in the kitchen, which had been extensively remodeled over the years. Further analysis revealed more clues about the old kitchen: marks on the floor indicated an original curved wall; remains of a pass-through had been found in the wall between the kitchen and the pantry; impressions on a door told the location of a shelf; and signs of hinges on a doorway indicated a swinging door had once given entry to the kitchen. (The swinging door was later found in the carriage house.) All these discoveries aided in the kitchen restoration, completed in 1985.

That same year, a cardboard box unearthed in a closet yielded a beautiful silver chandelier, complete with a pair of matching sconces. Museum staff combed through photographs taken circa 1913 and discovered that the silver light fixtures belonged in the second-floor sitting room. Under the supervision of an objects conservator, volunteers spent over four hundred hours carefully cleaning the three pieces, and the lights were eventually reinstalled, returning the room to its former beauty.