Sheehan Boardinghouse

Anaconda, Montana, established in 1883, was founded as a company town, driven by the gigantic Anaconda Mining Company smelting and reduction complex located on Anaconda’s east side. During the 1890s and 1900s, the town experienced unprecedented growth. The Company was embarking on a variety a new construction and expansion projects that increased the number of jobs available for laborers. The new Washoe Works facility, built in 1902 and the third smelting company constructed in Anaconda, was one of these projects. The availability of housing during the early 1900s suffered as many immigrant families moved to the community looking for work.  

To curb the shortage of available housing, The Company, as well as private entrepreneurs, began building boardinghouses, rooming houses, apartments, and rented cabins. General lodging expenses in Anaconda ranged between $8.00 to $25.00 per month, depending on the accommodations and whether board was provided. Similar Company-owned boardinghouses in the area charged $6.00 per week in 1901. Some Anaconda boardinghouses doubles as rooming houses, charging room and board separately. Discretionary accommodations allowed roomers to produce a punch card if a meal was desired, with the cost of a meal being approximately $0.35 in the early 1900s.  

Despite their seeming unfriendliness and regimentation, boarding and rooming houses in Anaconda, like in other industrial cities of America, provided lodgers with more than the primary service of a place to eat and sleep. The boardinghouse became a surrogate household complete with a substitute family for the many worker who had left their wives and other family members behind in their native lands. Boardinghouses were often established along ethnic lines: Irish owners rented to Irish boarders; Austrian owners rented to Slavic lodgers. Lodgers sought ethnically homogeneous boardinghouses for reasons of comfort and convenience. Lodgers with similar backgrounds shared the same language, the same problems, and the same interests. For most immigrants who had come from small European villages, boardinghouses also gave them some semblance of the closeness and camaraderie inherent to village life, yet absent from the independent and self-indulgent life that the general American city offered. 

Long-time resident of Anaconda and building of the Sheehan’s Boardinghouse, John Lund Jacobson immigrated to the United States from Norway during the early 1880s. He arrived in Anaconda in approximately 1885, working on numerous residences and buildings in the city between 1895 and 1925. He originally worked for the Anaconda Company on the Upper Works, but he soon established himself as a contractor and was able to secure several contacts over the years, specializing in residential constructions.  

Jacobson originally intended the building to serve as his coal and wood shop and private residence. Indeed, the Western Commercial style of the building, with its plain brick façade and large first-story window, reflects these functions. Only six years after construction, however, the building became a boardinghouse. Census records indicate that Peter McGuire, an Irishman who was born in 1870 and had immigrated to the United States in 1887, rented the building. Six Irish lodgers lived there in 1910, in addition to McGuire, his wife Annie (who ran the boardinghouse), and his four children.  

By 1920, Thomas Sheehan had bought the building, and, with his wife Flora, continued to maintain it as a boardinghouse. Thomas Sheehan was born in Canton, Massachusetts in 1876 to Irish immigrant parents. He came to Anaconda in 1910 and worked as a boiler maker and a lead burner for the Anaconda Company starting in 1914. He and Flora had six children and operated the boardinghouse until at least 1940, the same year during which Mr. Sheehan passed away.  

The Sheehan Boardinghouse is one of the best-preserved examples of combination commercial and residential construction in Anaconda, Montana, and was one of the few buildings attributable to important local builder John Lund Jacobson. Additionally, its associations with the development of Anaconda, and its adaptation into one of many multi-family dwellings in order to meet the housing demands of laborers, making the building one of the most significant resources in the city. 

Sheehan Boardinghouse, National Register of Historic Places. Accessed January 13th 2021. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/71974638.

Baumler, Ellen. The Story of Mary Ronan, Montana Historical Society. Accessed January 13th 2021. https://mhs.mt.gov/Portals/11/education/docs/GirlFromTheGulchesPt1.pdf.