The Stone Warehouse in the Northern Pacific Addition

This is a first-generation railroad warehouse. It stands on ground the United States granted to the Northern Pacific in 1864, in the addition the railroad opened when its trains reached Helena in June 1883. The fire-insurance surveyors who mapped Bozeman Street in 1884 and 1892 drew a stone merchandise house on this block, seventy-six feet by two hundred, with a loading platform on a Northern Pacific side track, labeled Kleinschmidt & Co. By 1930 the same street carried a second stone wholesale house, the Union Wholesale Grocery Company’s, with a concrete platform on a railroad spur — and the surveyors printed the number 1316 beside it.^{15 16}

Fifty-one years later it was the Nash-Finch Company’s wholesale grocery house, run on the ground by Christie Transfer & Storage, when the earthquakes of October 1935 tore through the Sixth Ward. The liquor warehouse next door fell. This one did not. The city issued Nash-Finch a permit to rebuild the stone end walls and repair the roof — nine hundred dollars — and two weeks later the newspaper reported the warehouse “nearly restored.”^{1 4}

From 1949 it was the house of Capital Transfer & Storage, three generations of the Horne family, who closed it on the first of July, 2026, after seventy-six years.²⁷ It sits today inside the Railroad Urban Renewal District, just outside the boundary of the listed Helena Railroad Depot Historic District — and it is older than the last stone warehouse that district was able to list.¹⁴

The ground before the house

The land under this warehouse entered private hands the way most of the ground along the Northern Pacific did: by act of Congress. On July 2, 1864, in the middle of the Civil War, Congress chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad Company and granted it the odd-numbered sections of public land within a broad band on either side of the line it was to build from Lake Superior to Puget Sound.¹³ The county describes this parcel as Section 29 of Township 10 North, Range 3 West — an odd-numbered section, inside the railroad’s primary limits.⁸

The first private owner the record names in Section 29 is Allen Wilkinson. A 2014 cultural-resource survey of a neighboring site in the same section, prepared for the Montana Business Assistance Connection, traces the story: in May 1871, twelve years before the railroad arrived, Wilkinson purchased 134 acres in Section 29, and his property was “absorbed into the Northern Pacific Addition by 1883.”²⁰ The Montana Historical Society holds an abstract of title for a lot in Block 19 of the same Addition, described as “established by Allen M. Wilkinson in 1870.”²¹ The Addition, in other words, grew out of a rancher’s section-land before the railroad ever laid a rail across it.

Whether these particular four lots passed from the United States to the railroad or to Wilkinson, and on what date, is recorded on a federal land patent in the General Land Office records. That patent has not yet been retrieved; it is a free document and is listed among the open questions at the end of this history.

The railroad comes to Helena

The first Northern Pacific train reached Helena on June 13, 1883.¹⁴ The city had graded the depot street in anticipation. The railroad’s depot stood a mile and a half from the old mining town on Last Chance Gulch, and the railroad’s trustees began selling the lots around it as fast as they could be platted. The Northern Pacific Addition was born as the depot suburb — a working district of freight houses, hotels, saloons and boarding houses that would later be known as the Sixth Ward.¹⁴

By January 1884 the Helena Weekly Herald was reporting that “a great deal of capital” had already been spent in the Addition — the Elite Saloon, the Grand Pacific Hotel, the Denver Hotel, Kirkendall’s warehouse.⁷ Three years later Northwest Magazine could write that “a population has sprung up around the Northern Pacific station.”¹⁴ Wholesale houses followed the tracks. The warehouse district on Bozeman Street is the direct result: the railroad placed a depot and an addition on the edge of town, and the merchants who moved goods by the carload built their warehouses beside the side tracks.

The stone warehouse — Kleinschmidt & Co., 1884

The earliest surviving image of a warehouse on this block is a surveyor’s drawing, made in November 1884 for the fire-insurance companies, seventeen months after the first train arrived.

The Sanborn Map & Publishing Company surveyed Helena in November 1884 — nine sheets for a town of ten thousand — and its index of special buildings sends the reader to sheet 9 for “Kleinschmidt & Co., Warehouse” and for the Northern Pacific depots.¹⁵ On that sheet, on the block between Bozeman Street and the rail road reservation, the surveyors drew a long stone building and wrote its dimensions on it: seventy-six feet by two hundred. They colored it blue, the code for stone. They drew a small office at one corner, a platform along the wall that faced the tracks, and a side track running between the platform and the Northern Pacific main line, so that a freight car could be spotted at the door. They labeled the block “25.”¹⁵

The tax card for 1316 Bozeman Avenue today reads: Northern Pacific Addition, Block 25, Lots 1 through 4, together with thirty-five feet of closed Cooke Street.⁸ The surveyors of 1884 wrote “25” on the block that held the Kleinschmidt house — the block between what are now Montana Avenue and Cooke Street, on the north side of Bozeman, backing on the railroad. Today’s parcel is on that same street, at Cooke Street, with a piece of the vacated street inside its lines. What the 1884 map settles beyond argument is the age of the neighborhood’s first stone warehouse: the Northern Pacific reached Helena in June 1883, and a finished stone merchandise house seventy-six by two hundred feet was standing on this block by November 1884, in the first building season of the depot suburb.¹⁵ Whether that house is the building standing at 1316 today is taken up in the next chapter, where the later maps are read.

The Kleinschmidts

The name on the warehouse belonged to one of Helena’s leading merchant families. The 1884 city directory lists Kleinschmidt Bros. & Co., general merchandise and commission, on the west side of Main Street between Edwards and Price, and A. Kleinschmidt & Co., wholesale and retail grocers and liquor dealers, at the corner of Main and Grand. Theodore H. Kleinschmidt was that year the mayor of Helena and assistant cashier of the First National Bank.²⁴ The family firm dealt in groceries and hardware from about 1879 to 1896.³⁰ Their stores were downtown on Main Street; the stone house on Bozeman Street was their rail-side merchandise warehouse, where the carloads came in.^{15 24}

A fire-insurance map records who used a building, not who owned it. Whether the Kleinschmidts held title to the four lots, or leased them from the railroad’s agents as other merchants in the Addition did, is a question for the deed books at the county clerk, which are indexed from 1865 but not yet read for these lots before 1995.¹⁰

Nash-Finch and Christie Transfer

By the 1930s the stone warehouse at 1316 belonged to the trade the depot suburb was built for: wholesale groceries. The 1930 map names the Union Wholesale Grocery Company at the number; by the autumn of 1935 the newspapers name the Nash-Finch Company’s “stone warehouse” in the same warehouse district, and the trucks at its door belonged to Christie Transfer & Storage.^{16 4 23}

Nash-Finch was one of the great grocery wholesalers of the northern plains. It began in 1885 as a confectionery and tobacco store in Devils Lake, North Dakota, kept by Fred Nash and his brothers Edgar and Willis. After a fire it moved to Grand Forks. In 1889 a railroad car of peaches arrived there with no buyer; the brothers borrowed the money to take the whole car, sold it, and were wholesalers from then on. They hired their first employee outside the family, Harry B. Finch, to clean fruit; he rose to run the company. Between 1907 and 1919 the firm built or bought fifty-four fruit houses across the northwestern states and Canada, and in November 1919 it moved its headquarters to Minneapolis. It incorporated in Delaware in 1921 as the Nash Finch Company. Its private label, “Our Family,” came out of the Depression years; its Helping Hand Society, founded in 1922 to care for the sick, the aged and the poor, became the Nash Foundation.²¹

The Helena house was one of those fruit-and-grocery warehouses on the line. The 1935 newspapers refer to it simply as the company’s “stone warehouse.”⁴ The local historian who later identified the building in a photograph of the earthquake wrote that “the warehouse was managed by the Christie Transfer & Storage Co.”²³ Christie was a Helena drayage and storage firm with its own warehouse in the Sixth Ward; it handled the State Liquor Board’s warehouse on Bozeman Street as well, next door.² In the fall of 1935 those were the two names on this block.

October 1935 — the earth shook, and the stone house stood

The Helena earthquakes of 1935 were a series, not a single night. The first small shocks came on October 3. A damaging shock on October 12 measured about magnitude 5.9. Then, at 9:48 on the evening of Friday, October 18, the main shock — magnitude 6.2, twelve seconds long — struck a city of stone and brick.²⁸

The epicenter lay less than a mile east of the Northern Pacific depot, and so the depot district took the blow.²³ The Helena Independent of the next morning headlined the damage in the Sixth Ward and walked the warehouse belt building by building. At the National Biscuit warehouse on Boulder Avenue, at the railroad land office, along the 1400 block of Railroad Avenue, and here:

“The Nash Finch wholesale grocery company’s office had the rear end torn out. The Christie Transfer company’s warehouse was badly shattered, and practically demolished.”Helena Independent, October 19, 1935 — quoted again in the National Register nomination for the depot district^{1 14}

Two of Nash-Finch’s people were in that office when it failed. David Carlton Shope and Bernice Roland were at work on Friday night; they got out and into the street before the walls started to crumble, and Shope’s car was buried under falling brick. They were married in Missoula the following night anyway.³

Next door, the earthquake finished a building that was already on its way out. The State Liquor Board’s warehouse on Bozeman Street — the old Lindsay Fruit Company building, managed by Christie — had been slated for replacement since the spring; construction of a new plant had begun that month on the Great Northern yard. On the night of the eighteenth most of its roof fell in and pushed the walls out; one wall came down on a freight car of whisky that was being unloaded and nearly struck an employee named Ray Howe. “A considerable amount of whisky was lost.”² The following morning a photographer recorded a Christie truck in the rubble, loading the cases that could be saved. That photograph is the one image of this block from 1935 that survives in a public archive. It shows the neighbor that fell. The stone warehouse stood beside it, outside the frame.¹⁹

The Northern Pacific yards themselves were wrecked — every brick building twisted, half of a great chimney down, the shops in ruins, the roundhouse foreman reported.² The city engineer, Oscar Baarson, began issuing repair permits the day after the shock, and on October 31 the Independent printed the list. One line on it is the most important sentence in the history of this building:

“Nash-Finch company; rebuild end walls and repair roof of company’s stone warehouse building; $900.”Helena Independent, October 31, 1935 — “Building Permits Issued to Repair Damage of Quake”⁴

It is a city permit, printed in the paper of record, for a stone warehouse belonging to Nash-Finch. The work is repair — end walls and roof — not demolition, and nine hundred dollars in 1935 was the cost of putting a damaged building back, not of replacing one. The permit was taken out before the great aftershock of October 31, which came at 11:37 that morning at magnitude 6.0; the company was already rebuilding its stone house when the ground moved again.^{4 28}

Two weeks later the paper reported on the recovery of the district:

“Reconstruction of a number of the commercial buildings of the city was proceeding rapidly, notably in the warehouse district at the Northern Pacific depot. Badly damaged, the Nash-Finch, A. M. Holter and other warehouses are nearly restored to their former condition to meet the demands of their business.”Helena Independent, November 12, 1935⁶

The warehouse was damaged, repaired, and back in trade within a month. The shocks went on — a magnitude 5.5 on November 28, and some eighteen hundred recorded tremors between October and the following April — but the stone warehouse had already been put right.²⁸ The liquor house next door was never rebuilt on Bozeman Street; the State Liquor Board opened its new warehouse on Front Street in 1936, designed by Norman B. DeKay and built by Cahill-Mooney of Butte.²² The State Liquor Board’s operation left Bozeman Street; the stone warehouse remained.

One qualification is necessary. The 1935 newspaper lines name the company and call its building a stone warehouse; they do not print the house number. The identification of that stone warehouse as 1316 Bozeman rests on the Helena historian Kennon Baird, who, captioning the Knudsen photograph in 2020, placed the liquor wreck “adjacent to the Nash-Finch food and beverage distributor warehouse, 1316 Bozeman.”²³ The city’s own permit file for October 1935, which would carry the address line, has not yet been pulled from the Building Division. That file would settle the address beyond question.

Capital Transfer & Storage — the Hornes, 1949–2026

In 1949 a Helena family founded a moving and storage company that operated from this warehouse for the next seventy-six years. Capital Transfer & Storage was started by John Horne’s grandfather and father; his grandmother and his mother worked in it too. John came on full-time in 1971, his brother in 1974, and in time John’s son worked there as well — three generations of one family in one building.²⁷ The company moved households and offices, warehoused and shipped and stored, and painted its name across the long white wall of the stone house facing the street: Transfer & Storage Co.

The public land records pick the family up in 1995. On May 26 of that year Dorothy M. Horne and Capital Transfer & Storage mortgaged Northern Pacific Addition Block 25, Lots 1 through 4, to Norwest Bank of Montana — the earliest instrument on the county’s online index for these lots, and proof that the family already owned the warehouse by then; a release recorded that June refers back to an older mortgage, in Book M3, page 278, that has not yet been read.¹⁰ The mortgages that followed, in 1997, 2005 and 2007, all cite the same four lots and a city ordinance, No. 1758, that runs through the Addition’s titles and most likely accounts for the thirty-five feet of closed Cooke Street the tax card attaches to the parcel.¹⁰

On November 14, 2007, the family organized Capital Transfer & Storage LLC, with John L. Horne as its registered agent at 1316 Bozeman Avenue.²⁶ On December 31, 2007, Dorothy M. Horne’s estate deeded the warehouse to John L. Horne — Book M37, page 7167, instrument 3141282, prepared by the Harlen Law Firm of Helena — a succession within the family, not a sale; the same deed was recorded again in May 2010.¹⁰ In 2018 John Horne also bought the lots across the street at 1315 Bozeman, on Block 24.⁹

Capital Transfer & Storage closed on July 1, 2026, after seventy-six years. Eight people worked there at the end, many of them for decades. John Horne, the last of the family in the business, told the local station that the closing was the industry’s doing — the difficulty of finding workers after the pandemic — and that what he would remember was not the trucks or the warehouse but the customers, whose thank-you cards and notes covered the walls of the office.²⁷ He emptied the warehouse himself.