Butte, America’s Story Episode 75 - Frances Symons
Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson.
In 2006 when Irene Scheidecker and I wrote the booklet on historic stained glass in Butte churches for Butte Citizens for Preservation and Revitalization (with support from the Montana Cultural Trust and the Butte-Silver Bow Urban Revitalization Agency), we encountered a small mystery which has now been unraveled.
The 1903 Congregation B’nai Israel Synagogue at Galena and Washington contains two dedicated stained glass windows. The large circular one in the south face of the building commemorates Elias and Mina Oppenheimer, whose sons joined with Harry and William Symons to establish one of Butte’s most prominent department stores, Symons’ Dry Goods Company. The other window, a triptych, is in memory of Mrs. Frances A. Symons. Who was she?
The only person of that name that Irene and I could find in Butte was a daughter of Teresa and Isaac Newton Symons. The daughter died January 30, 1899, just five weeks old, obviously not a “Mrs.” I met recently with the granddaughter of Isaac and Teresa Symons, 85-year-old Jacque Ensign, and her daughter Susan, visiting Butte from Berkeley, California, and Henderson, Nevada. With the help of the family’s genealogical research, we now know how Mrs. Frances A. Symons was connected to Butte.
Frances Aarons, born in England in 1828, married Samuel Symons in New York City. By the 1860s they were at Virginia City, Nevada, where most of their children were born, and in 1880 the family moved to Salt Lake City. Isaac appears to have been the first of their sons to come to Butte, before 1885. His brothers William and Harry came to Butte in 1897 to partner with Joseph and H.E. Oppenheimer, whose sister had married another Symons, George. They founded the Symons’ Dry Goods Company in 1897 at 54 West Park, but by 1902 they had expanded into multiple buildings at 66-82 West Park, occupying 50,000 square feet. Those buildings were all destroyed by fire on September 25, 1905, and the present Phoenix Building, housing Symons, rose on the same site in 1906, ultimately becoming “The Store Beautiful.”
William and Harry and the Oppenheimer brothers ran the business, and George served as the firm’s lawyer. Isaac was a buyer and head of the hat department. The Symons families lived all over the west side, including 815 West Park, 9 North Excelsior, and 212 North Crystal (all still standing) and 223 North Washington. The surviving Symons sold the business and the store became Burr’s in 1946.
The stained glass windows in the synagogue were dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Frances A. Symons by her children when the synagogue was built in 1903. Frances died in Salt Lake City in 1891 and is buried there with her husband Samuel, whose grave is marked by a 15-foot-high obelisk. She probably never lived in Butte, but she might have visited Isaac here.
As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.
