Former Missoulian recalls early history of the area

By Roberta Donovan

The ceremony, with long speeches by important-looking men, meant very little to the 9-year-old Lizzie Schilling. She watched as one of the men took a spade and dug a little of the soil in the open meadow where the crowd had gathered. But Lizzie was really more interested in the other youngsters, who, like her, had followed the procession toward Mount Sentinel that day in 1895.

Lizzie had been riding her bicycle near her home in Missoula when she noticed a large crowd of people, in buggies and on foot, making their way to the edge of town. She followed to see what all the excitement was about and, without knowing it at the time, witnessed the groundbreaking for the first building at the University of Montana.

“It was the main building,” Lizzie, now Mrs. Elizabeth Cole, recalled recently. “It was the one with the clock tower. I think it is used as an administration building now.”

The groundbreaking is but one of many memories Mrs. Cole, who now lives in Lewistown, has of her childhood in Missoula. The community also has a special place in her heart because her father helped develop part of it. A German immigrant, Edward Schilling had just one dollar in his pocket when he arrived in the United States. After living in Butte for a time, he moved his family to Missoula when Elizabeth was three years old.

He operated a saloon in Missoula for a time, but his wife, a staunch Methodist and teetotaler, nagged him so constantly about his “sinful” occupation that he finally sold it and started a men’s clothing store.

He also was involved in buying and selling real estate and Mrs. Cold remembers particularly one transaction.

“Papa came home with a map and said he had bought a great deal of land in Orchard Homes and was going to name the streets,” Mrs. Cole recalled.

Four of the streets were named for the family – Schilling Street for her father, and Lizzie, Nellie and Cora Streets for her and her two sisters.

Mrs. Cole was in high school at the time.

“Papa always had an eye to the future,” she said. “He knew Missoula had to grow and there was a mountain stopping it on one side, so he figured it would grow in the opposite direction, and it did.”

The Schilling family’s first home in Missoula was directly across the street from the courthouse. Its location figured in an incident that has remained in Mrs. Cole’s memory many years.

She was no more than four or five years old at the time. Several Indians had been convicted and sentenced to die and were to be hung in the courtyard around the courthouse. Her mother could not bear to watch the executions, so she arose before daybreak, called the livery stable to have the family horse and buggy brought to the house and took Lizzie and her infant sister to the country to spend the day.

“We left about 5 a. m., before it was daylight,” Mrs. Cole recalled, “and we didn’t get home until late afternoon. I remember the dark morning and my mother telling me to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake the baby.”

Apparently, not everyone in Missoula was as sensitive as Mrs. Schilling, as a number of people asked her permission to bring chairs and sit on her front porch to watch the hangings.

“My mother told them she didn’t care what they did, but she was going to the country, so she wouldn’t see it,” Mrs. Cole said.

“There were a lot of Indians in Missoula at that time and they often went door-to-door, selling coat racks, footstools and other items made out of buffalo horns.

“The never wore anything but blankets,” Mrs. Cole said. “I was afraid of them.”

Buffalo must have been plentiful in the area, because not only did the Indians sell things made from the horns, but buffalo meat was commonly sold in the meat markets of Missoula.

“You couldn’t go into a meat market without seeing a whole buffalo carcass hanging there,” Mrs. Cole said. “Mother wouldn’t buy it, so I never tasted buffalo meat until several years ago when a friend gave me some. I made a stew and it was the best stew I have ever eaten in my life.”

Missoula was served by three railroads. In fact, according to Mrs. Cole, railroads are what built the community. But they also contributed, at least indirectly, to the large number of “bums” or “tramps” who rode the rails into town. One incident, which Mrs. Cole heard about as a girl, has remained in her memory ever since.

Housewives often had tramps knock on the door and ask for food and on this particular occasion, one asked for a handout at the home of Mrs. Greenough, the wife of a local millionaire. She told him that she would give him something to eat, but he could cut some wood for her kitchen in return for the food.

She started getting out the bread and meat for a sandwich, but when she didn’t hear any chopping, she went to investigate. The tramp was nowhere in sight, but he had left a slip of paper on the back steps with the message, “Tell them you saw me, but you didn’t see me saw.”

The incident was reported in the Missoula newspaper.

As a little girl, Mrs. Cole attended Central School in downtown Missoula.

“It was a big schoolhouse,” she said, “and above the teacher’s desk on the wall was always a whip. It was common enough for the boys to get whipped with that.”

Girls, she explained, were disciplined by having their hands slapped with a ruler. A very shy little girl, she was afraid of her teacher.

When Mrs. Cole was about nine years old, the family moved to the south side of Missoula. Their home was on the edge of town.

“The prairie stretched around our house,” she recalled. “In the spring it was pink with bitterroots in bloom. We used to gather our aprons full of the blossoms and put them in soup plates.”

Downtown Missoula, as Mrs. Cole remembers it, was “nothing but mud! The streets were all mud. I remember the mule teams coming in from different mines and standing in the streets – six to eight mules on one of the big wagons.”

In those days, the entire area from the University to Pattee Canyon was open country, with only an occasional house here and there.

The first automobile in Missoula created quite a stir. “A doctor – I don’t remember his name – had the first car in Missoula,” Mrs. Cole said. “The people just went daft over it. He would drive by and the horses would rear.”

Mrs. Cole moved to Wallace, Idaho, after her marriage to her first husband, Fred Anderson. Her return to Missoula, in August of 1910, was spectacular, to say the least.

She and her husband were among the many people who escaped a tremendous forest fire, with only the clothes on their back, by riding in boxcars to Missoula.

Clanging bells warned the Andersons that the fire was topping the ridge behind their home, which was perched high on the side of a hill. As they raced from their house and down 60 steps to the street level, she carried only the Bible she had been reading when the alarm sounded and her horsehair hat which had been hanging in the hall.

“The burning brands kept falling around our heads and the dry grass was burning around our feet. We didn’t know if we could get out alive or not!” she said.

Fortunately, an engine with a caboose was slowing to a stop. The trainmen saw them and took them aboard. One woman, who tried to board the train with her belongings tied in a tablecloth was told there was no room for her things and they were thrown off the train.

When the train reached Mullan, it hooked onto 16 empty boxcars and the rest of the long journey to Missoula was made in them.

The train made its way through mile after mile of burning forests, picking up refugees along the way. At one point, those aboard the train watched as the entire village of Taft burned to the ground. The trip from Wallace to Missoula took 11 hours instead of the usual four.

“We had to sit on the floor and there were no doors on the boxcar,” Mrs. Cole recalled. “It was very cold.”

The train was met in Missoula by a group, possibly the Red Cross, serving hot coffee to the chilled and weary refugees.

After her first husband’s death, Elizabeth married an attorney, Burton Cole, and they moved to Lewistown in 1912.

Although many years have passed, Mrs. Cole still remembers the Missoula of her girlhood.

The above article appeared in The Missoulian on Sunday, February 18, 1979.

 

Mrs. Cole’s father was one of two Schilling brothers who came to Missoula before the turn of the century. Edward, her father, apparently came to Missoula shortly after his brother Anton in 1888. Both brothers became successful in Missoula. Edward’s obituary, from The Missoulian on June 19, 1914, appears below:

Edward Schilling Dies Suddenly In His Room

Once a Rich Man from Local Investments Suddenly Called.

Edward W. Schilling, who has been a resident of Missoula since about 1888, died suddenly in his room at the Shapard hotel yesterday afternoon, some time between the noon hour and 3:30 o’clock. With his passing another of Missoula’s unique characters is gone. In the prime of his business career here Mr. Schilling was counted one of Missoula’s wealthy men. He started in the liquor business with a very small capital when he first came to the city, and from the beginning gradually amassed a fortune. His early real estate investments proved very profitable. He was, in fact, considered a far-sighted speculator, and everything which he touched seemed to turn into money. Then he started to build business blocks, the Schilling block, Capital beer hall, the improvements known as Prosperity block on Higgins avenue, the Grand Pacific hotel, a beautiful residence on South Fifth street, and several other smaller buildings resulting from his enterprise. The first Schilling home, a little cottage across Pine street from the county jail, still stands. But during late years, Mr. Schilling’s fortune slipped from his grasp very fast. Personal friends say that within the last ten years he practically threw away $12,000 in cash.

Unfounded Rumor.

The rumor that started yesterday that Mr. Schilling had committed suicide was entirely unfounded. His was a natural death. It came while he was sitting in a chair, leaning on his cane. In this posture he was found when a boy at the hotel went to call him about 3:30 o’clock. He had gone to his room at noon, and no one knew that he was ill. Death was due to a sudden attack of heart failure.

Mr. Schilling was 54 years of age.

Mr. Schilling was estranged from his family a number of years ago. He leaves a wife and three daughters, Miss Cora Schilling, Mrs. Burton Cole and Mrs. Johnson, all residents of Lewistown.

No arrangements for the funeral were made last night.

 

An obituary for Edward’s wife appeared in The Daily Missoulian on February 1, 1945:

Mrs. Mary Schilling Passes in California

Mrs. Mary Schilling, an early resident of Missoula, died recently in Glendale, Cal., where she made her home with a daughter, Mrs. Myron Stowell, it was learned by relatives here Wednesday morning. Mrs. Schilling celebrated her eightieth birthday last May. She was a member of the Christian Science church.

Mrs. Schilling was the widow of Ed Schilling, a pioneer settler in Missoula, who built the Park hotel and several buildings on the west side of the 300 block on North Higgins avenue, and whose home was one of the first to be erected on the South side. She left Missoula about 25 years ago.

Survivors include three daughters now married, who are remembered here as Elizabeth, Nell and Cora Schilling, and many relatives in Missoula.

 

Sale of property for the Fountain

One of the more interesting articles to be found regarding Edward Schilling’s Missoula career appeared in The Daily Missoulian on August 8, 1905:

Schilling Property Is Secured

Action Tending Towards Its Purchase Is Taken At Council Meeting.

The Edward Schilling property, which consists of a small triangular plot of land close to the Northern Pacific depot, will soon become the property of the city of Missoula, after controversies extending over a period of more than two years. At last night’s meeting of the council Attorney Hughes, representing Mr. Schilling, made a proposition to the city to sell the property for $1,250, which was readily accepted, and City Attorney Murphy was instructed to close the deal, and according to the statement of Attorney Hughes the deed will be ready today and the transfer made.

The Schilling property has been a bone of contention with the council, the chamber of commerce and the business men of Missoula for the past two years, and at various times the Northern Pacific Railway company has become interested, but all propositions made to purchase the property had been turned down by Mr. Schilling, who seemed bent on constructing a building thereon. The city some weeks ago offered Mr. Schilling $1,000 for the property, but this was declined. Of this amount of the Northern Pacific offered to pay $250, the chamber of commerce to pay $250, the chamber of commerce and business men $250, and the city of Missoula the other $500.

The little plot, now that it is to become the property of the city, is to be turned into a small park, and it is the intention of the council to construct a fountain there within the very near future.

https://www.newspapers.com/image/348675444/?terms=%22Edward%2Bschilling%22