According to Emporis, the next tallest is the State Capitol, at 164 feet, quite a bit shorter than the spires of St. Helena. Designed by Albert O. Von Herbulis, circa 1906, St. Helena Cathedral stands no less than 230 feet to the top of its twin spires and has a footprint of 246 feet by 150 feet, with ceiling vaults of approximately 65 feet in height. Its windows contain 11,696 square feet of art glass.
The cathedral's organ, with an impressive 40 ranks and over 2300 pipes, is a Wicks, Opus 6442. It incorporates the pipes of an earlier Estey organ which was given by Thomas Cruse in memory of his daughter, Mary Margaret, who died on the Feast of St. Cecelia, 1914. The cathedral's exterior is impressive, but the interior is absolutely awesome, possibly the finest cathedral we've visited.
Cathedral of Saint Helena
Built between 1908 and 1924, of tawny-colored Bedford Indiana limestone, and topped by a steeply- pitched red-tile roof, the Cathedral of Saint Helena is a forthright Gothic Revival structure ("Geometric" Gothic, to be exact), loosely patterned after the great cathedral of Cologne, Germany, and a near replica of the "Votive Church" of Vienna.
A striking feature of the cathedral is its stained glass. Two tiers or stories of tall and relatively-wide windows (at the aisle and clerestory levels) contain geometric tracery and a total of 11,696 square feet of art glass. 59 of the windows depict a sequence of events from the Old and new Testaments and subsequent Church History.
The Cathedral of Saint Helena is the tallest structure in Helena. The matched spires are 230 feet tall, and the building's physical prominence is made even greater by its location on the top of a hill at the head of Lawrence street, a major east-west connector crossing the central business district.
The north tower contains 15 hand-cast bells, made by the McShane Foundry of Baltimore, which are operated from a keyboard in the choir loft. A feature of the building's exterior is the collection of life-size statuary on the west front and on the north and south sides of the towers. 29 statues, depicting Saints and such figures as Copernicus, Dante, Ampere, Gutenberg, Pasteur, and Christopher Columbus are placed there.
The Cathedral of Saint Helena measures approximately 246 feet by 150 feet, the ceiling vaults are approximately 65 feet above the floor, and the twin spires are 230 feet tall. The building site is a full city block, a site of approximately 65,400 square feet.
It took Helena about thirty years to grow from a mining camp to the financial and political center of Montana; but. once having achieved that position, and for a brief period of time (roughly between 1880 and 1920) Helena had all of the requisites to build on a grand scale: a concentration of wealth, great optimism and civic Bride on the part of those holding it, the availability of highly skilled and relatively inexpensive labor, and of a wide range of building materials, and an enormous city-wide sense of confidence. Add to this the personalities of a few key men, including Bishop Carroll, Thomas Cruse, and Senator J. A. Walsh, and the result was a spectacular concentration of the best of the period's characteristic architecture. The Cathedral of Saint Helena is the crowning achievement; the result of one of those fortunate combinations of historical accident which is unlikely to repeat itself.
From the NRHP Registration Form