Butte, America’s Story Episode 92 - John Noyes
Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson.
John Noyes is not typically on the list of remarkable men of Butte, but he probably should be. Born in Canada in 1828 to parents from New England, he joined the California gold rush at age 23. In 1860 he was at Virginia City, Nevada, continuing work as a placer miner, when he became part of a company of 115 men sent out to fight the Indians. Noyes was among the 17 survivors.
After brief sojourns in Washington, Idaho, and Montana in 1861-65, he journeyed back to Canada. Returning to the US, he abandoned his plan to become a farmer in Missouri, and bought a shipment of mercantile goods to supply to the Montana mining camps. His initial purchase was lost in the sinking of the steamer U.S. Grant, which was trapped in ice jams and sunk on the Missouri River at the mouth of the Platte, just south of Omaha, Nebraska, in March 1866.
Undaunted (and with insurance money in hand) he brought a second shipment to Ft. Benton later in 1866 and soon made his way to Butte.
His main Butte mines, the #1 Original and #2 Original, gave him significant capital. Among his most worthwhile investments were real estate tracts for the growing town. He and partner Upton laid out and sold lots in two 1888 additions to the Butte townsite: Noyes & Upton’s Addition defined streets from Gold to Aluminum, between Main and Montana, and the Noyes & Upton Railroad Addition platted the neighborhood from California to Oregon Street, between Third and Front. Technically, that second addition was part of South Butte, a community distinct from Butte itself until the middle 1890s. That’s why First, Second, and Third Streets are not located in the main uptown Butte business district. Their names and locations relate to their origin in the separate town of South Butte.
The late 1880s were Butte’s first real “boom,” with the population surging from 4,000 or so in 1880 to more than 20,000 in 1890. Noyes’s mining and investments turned him into a millionaire by the time of his death, March 21, 1902, his 74th birthday. You can find an excellent report on Mr. Noyes and his wife Elmira (who he married when she was 15 and he was 42, and who was important in Butte society in her own right) in Zena Beth McGlashan’s book, Buried in Butte.
The prestigious Noyes home was at 47 E. Granite, the northwest corner of Wyoming, where the Noyes family were near neighbors to Montana Supreme Court Chief Justice William Pemberton. The new Resodyn building occupies that corner today. The Noyes family was large, and also occupied a home around the corner at 215 N. Wyoming, across the street from the Butte Brewery. There’s a parking lot there today, across from the Motel 6.
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.
