The Place:
Built in 1889, the Owsley Block (#2) was erected as the home of the Hoffman Hotel, which remained in the building well into the twentieth century. Always having had retail outlets on the ground floor, the Hoffman occupied the upper two storeys, functioning as a rooming house for the working class of Butte, of which there were a great many - the population peaking around 100,000 when all the mines were in full swing.
A brick building with (probably) iron posts and tall glass on the lower floor's façade, that lower floor has, in recent years, been remodeled, now with almost floor to ceiling glass within very thin metal frames. The upper floors were given a pair of bow or oriel windows flanking bowed balconies. Above is what is probably a pressed metal cornice with a small gabled parapet in the centre containing the name of the building and the construction date - 1889.
The Person:
Born in Missouri in 1845, William Owsley arrived in Butte at the age of eighteen, eventually making a fortune, not in mining, as everyone else in town seems to have done, but with a livery business, ultimately the largest in Butte. While in the process of making his fortune Owsley served two terms as Butte's mayor - 1882-1883 & 1884 -1885.
He married Miss Kate Van Ettin of New York in November of 1869. She died young and he later married Bertha Irene "Birdie" (Pease) Owsley (1862-1944) who died March 31, 1944 in Idaho Falls, Bonneville County, Idaho. Owsley died on April 18, 1919 in Twin Bridges, Madison County, Montana and is buried in the Twin Bridges Cemetery.
William Owsley came to Butte in 1863. He built several buildings that bear his name, but the Owsley Block, which was completed about 1891 and stood at Park and Main Streets, was his best known. It burned down in 1973. (The new Northwestern Energy building is now located on that corner.) This was also the site of his livery business which made him his fortune.
From the MT Genweb
OWSLEY BLOCK
A pair of two-story projecting bays, rounded balconies, and slender columns with ornate bracketing give this former hotel a delightful nineteenth-century charm. Built by early settler and former Butte mayor William Owsley, the Owsley Block housed the Hoffman Hotel (which offered rooms to let on the upper two floors) and ground-floor commercial space. A variety of early tenants included a drugstore, liquor store, restaurant, the Scotch Woolen Mills tailor shop, and Albert Keene shoes. In 1929, Hoffman’s still offered upstairs lodging. The bays have been faithfully restored to their turn-of-the-twentieth-century appearance and “mock” windows painted on the building’s sides indicate original window placement.
From the NRHP plaque at the building