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Philipsburg, MT

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Posted by:  T0SHEA

12T E 323410 N 5133490

The old mining town of Philipsburg could (though it's unlikely) have instead been named Deidesheimerburg, for it was named after Philip Deidesheimer.

The Place:
The town has managed to retain the majority of its nineteenth century buildings, its old courthouse, the county jail, two old brick and granite schools and all four of its original churches. Philipsburg has been recognized as one of the nation's Prettiest Painted Places and was chosen by the governor as Montana's First Tourism Community of the Year.

Philipsburg, the county seat of Granite County, is a tiny city of just over 1,000 which, though it existed before the discovery of silver nearby, continued to exist solely because of the silver mines to the east of the town. Begun as a small settlement in the mid 1860s, it began to boom in the mid 1880s, with its greatest years of expansion occurring in 1887-1889. The silver and financial crash of 1893 halted expansion for several years, but the town rebounded, with more expansion occurring in later years.

After the mines played out the town survived on forestry, a bit of farming and later tourism. Philipsburg has managed to retain many of its historic buildings and is now a National Historic District. In the 1990s much of the town was restored and/or repainted and now is one of the best preserved late 19th century mining towns in Montana.

The Person:
Philip Deidesheimer was a well known mining engineer who was responsible for the invention of square-set mine timbering. It was he who designed and supervised the ore smelter around which the town originally formed. German born in 1832, in 1864 he settled in what was to become Philipsburg, Montana, named in his honor. The town was first registered in 1867, under the name of Philipsburg.

"Deidesheimer was born to Jewish parents in Darmstadt, Hesse in 1832 before German unification. He attended the prestigious Freiberg University of Mining (Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg). He died on 21 July 1916 in San Francisco, California.

In 1852, at nineteen, the young mining engineer travelled to the California gold fields to work for several years, including in Georgetown. In April 1860 he was hired by W. F. Babcock, a trustee of the Ophir Mine, part of the Comstock Lode silver mining boom in Nevada, and solved one of the Comstock mines' most critical engineering needs.

Square set timbering
Deidesheimer invented a system, now known as square set timbering, using heavy timber "cubes" as supports for underground mining tunnels and shafts, that enabled skilled miners to open three-dimensional cavities of any size. In large openings, the cubes could be filled with waste rock, creating a solid pillar of wood and rock from floor to roof ("back" in miner's terminology).

Deidesheimer created the square set timbering system for the Comstock Load's Ophir Mine in Virginia City, Nevada in 1860.[3] The system, which was inspired by the structure of honeycombs, enabled mining of the large silver orebodies of the Comstock Lode, which were in very weak rock—in miner's terms, "heavy ground".

Deidesheimer refused to patent the innovation, which was easily the most important mining innovation of 1860.

Ophir Mine
As was common with the Comstock mines, the rock in the Ophir Mine was soft and easily collapsed into the working stopes (cavities where ore is extracted). In addition, the presence of clay that would swell greatly upon exposure to air caused great pressures that the mine timbering of that day could not hold back. The square set timbering method devised by Deideshimer slowed the swelling action long enough for ore extraction, though with time the timbering was crushed by the enormous pressures found in the Comstock mines.

Deidesheimer was made superintendent of the Ophir Mine by mine owner William Sharon in early 1875. He was bankrupted by speculation in mining stocks in 1878.

Other mines
In 1866 Deidesheimer designed and supervised the construction of the Hope Mill and smelter for the St. Louis and Montana Mining Company, for placer and in-ground silver mining in Granite County, Montana. The town that formed around the Hope Mill was named Philipsburg, in honor of Philip Deidesheimer.

After the decline of the Comstock mines in the late 1870s, Deideshimer continued his successful mining engineer career at the Young America Mine in Sierra City, California, where he was one of the five mine owners made rich over the five years of good production at that mine.

The development of his square-set timbering method was fictionalized in The Diedesheimer Story in season one of Bonanza. Philip Deidesheimer was the subject of the NPR radio program The Engines of Our Ingenuity in episode 1901 and was inducted into the (USA) National Mining Hall of Fame.
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