Spottswood Mansion To Be Dismantled
Historic Old Mansion to Be Dismantled
By Betty Butler
Missoula, Mont., Oct. 4. – Within a few weeks, only the ghosts of 65 years of Montana history will occupy the towering, turreted mansion on Gerald avenue in Missoula’s University district. The old Bonner home with the many-windowed tower, the sweeping driveway and the impressive portico shadowed the immense dark fir trees, that has fired the romantic imaginations of three generations of Missoula and state university youth, is slated for destruction.
Mrs. E. W. Spottswood, who was a young girl when her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Edward L. Bonner, built the house in 1891-93, will leave the mansion for the last time about November 1, and then it and the block of landscaped, tree-shrouded grounds which surrounds it, will be taken over by a group of Missoula business men who have purchased it as the site for a cooperative apartment development. Destruction of the manor probably will begin in the spring.
To those who knew it in the gay, turn-of-the-century days when the Bonners entertained lavishly, the house would seem bare and forlorn now. The huge third-floor ballroom with its adjoining round tower-room, which once echoed the laughter of dozens of Montana’s great and near-great, in more recent years was crammed with mementos of a colorful past – antique French loveseats, Scottish snuffboxes, pearl inlaid tables, polished wooden Japanese masks – and books, books, books. Now it is empty, like most of the other rooms.
Relics to Travel
The life-size porcelain shepherd boy who came from Bohemia more than half-century ago to play his flute atop the mantel in the big, wood-paneled entrance hall will be journeying to a new home, along with countless other relics of world travels and Northwest history.
The pleasure which the Bonner family, and later the Spottswood family, found in collecting unique mementos of their world travels will not die with the house, for many of the art works, the fine furniture and items of historical interest have been given by Mrs. Spottswood to Montana State university and to the museum at the university.
Hundreds of books, many of them rare, out-of-print editions, now are being catalogued at the university library. Those not needed at the university will be sent, along with a vast collection of magazines, to other state institutions.
Other keepsakes too precious to part with Mrs. Spottswood is moving to the family summer home at Seeley lake or to the home of her daughter, Mrs. J. W. Speer, in Portland. Missoula will remain her official residence, though between visiting her daughter and grandchildren and the yen for travel which the years have never dimmed, she may not spend much time here.
Many of the home’s precious things cannot be moved – the magnificently carved oak paneling, the elaborate mantelpieces, the tinted and carved art glass, the tile-fronted fireplaces. Paneling for the lower floor, Mrs. Spottswood recalled, is eastern hardwood, but the upper floors were done in native woods milled at Bonner, the lumber town east of here to which her father gave his name, and which was one cornerstone of the family fortune.
When the Bonners moved into the house in 1893, there were few houses and no streets on the now heavily-populated south side of Missoula. Dr. and Mrs. Spottswood were married in 1903 and they built the residence on Gerald avenue which is now the Sigma Nu fraternity house. They moved into the old Bonner home in 1936. Dr. Spottswood died in 1952.
Held Property
For some time after she decided to give up the family home, Mrs. Spottswood held the property for the Missoula County high school, for it is directly east of the old Higgins avenue high school, now used for freshman students. But the new high school was built on the south outskirts of town, and only last summer the school board decided it could not purchase the property.
Some Missoula citizens talked of trying to preserve it for a city museum and park, but upkeep and taxes presented a staggering financial problem and the movement never reached the city council.
The above article appeared in The Spokesman-Review October 5, 1958.