142-year-old building
holds gold-rush history
By The Associated Press | May 9, 2009
WHITE SULPHUR SPRINGS — Cables stretch from wall to wall beneath the ceiling inside the Union League of America Hall here, holding the 142-year-old structure together.
Broken glass, crushed soda cans and other debris litters the floor, left by vandals who broke in years ago. The windows have since been boarded up.
The plain, wooden building doesn’t look like much. And up until this week, when Meagher County Historical Association members led a reporter inside, the doors of the building— one of Montana’s oldest — had not been opened in about eight years, said Maggie Buckingham, former historical association board member.
“We used to store files in here,” she said. “I think the last time someone came in was to move them.”
But its long history, and now its disrepair, has led The Montana Preservation Alliance to name it one of the state’s most endangered places.
In its lifetime, the Union League of America Hall has stood as a symbol against the Confederacy, been moved by a team of oxen across the county, transferred hands from a brewer to a temperance group and heard the choirs of the First Presbyterian Church.
Union supporters in the Union League of America built it some 30 miles west of here in what was known as Diamond City, a former gold-rush town settled by ex-Confederate soldiers, according to national register records.
The Union League members were outnumbered in Diamond City, an area known as Confederate Gulch that became the county seat.
The Union League dedicated the hall on the second anniversary of Robert E. Lee’s surrender, April 9, 1865, and the ceremony marked the first time the United States flag had flown over the area.
Helena’s Rocky Mountain Gazette documented the event by saying that the flag pole, painted black and white with the black on top, “was emblematic of the party which puts the black above the white,” national register records state. The newspaper referred to the Union League as the “Underground League of Africa” in previous reports.
The league sold the building to cover its debts, according to national register records, and by 1875 it was owned by a brewer, H.J. Ramspeck.
“The brewer used it and then he sold it to a temperance organization,” Fowlie said, grinning. “It’s kind of funny.”
The Diamond Lodge No. 5 of the Independent Order of Good Templars, a group that pledged abstinence from alcohol and worked toward passing prohibition legislation, bought the hall in 1875.
But by 1880, the population in Diamond City had dwindled to 60 people and the county seat was moved to White Sulphur Springs.
At that time and still today, Diamond City “had more graves than buildings,” Fowlie said. Only a small cemetery now marks the boom town, where miners yielded more gold per acre than any other area in the state.
So, the Templars took down the building and moved it to White Sulphur Springs.
“They raised money and everything to bring it down here, but by the time they got it here they were flat broke,” Fowlie said.
The mortgage holders, William and Matilda Parberry, foreclosed on the building in 1884 and in 1888 the local First Presbyterian Church bought it.
The church sat about 200 people in the sanctuary; after the basement was built in 1935, it hosted Sunday school.
The Presbyterians used the hall for more than 80 years. But in 1971, the church had outgrown the space and gave the hall to the county historical association. At that time, the hall claimed the title of the oldest, continually occupied public building in Montana. But since then, the hall has sat vacant spare for a few fundraising events about a decade ago and Buckingham’s wedding. The hall is the one of the few remnants of both the Union League of America and Diamond City. But without funds to restore it, the building waits in limbo.
From the Helena Independent Record