Episode 24 - Elizabeth Christy

Elizabeth Christy (left) with Eva Curie

Welcome to Mining City Reflections where we illuminate the history of Butte, Montana through the stories and observations of 20th century women who lived there. I’m your host, Marian Jensen.

The oral history collection in the Butte Archives has preserved the personal reminiscences of many of the city’s women. In vivid detail they bring to life their challenges and achievements in the boom to bust town. Overcoming cultural and language barriers, often difficult working conditions and poverty, these women became vital, contributing members of the community.

Others faced less apparent challenges that nevertheless required profound courage. Such is the story of Elisabeth Christy, who along with her husband, Matt, owned and ran one of Butte’s many neighborhood grocery stores. 

Her oral history was taken in her home in Butte in 1980 by Helen Bresler for the University of Montana Oral History Project. At that time the Christy’s adult son, George, still lived at home with his parents, having suffered brain damage as a result of a childhood bout of rheumatic fever. 

Elisabeth was born in Missoula in 1903 but eventually her father, a painter and paper hanger from Canada, moved the family to Butte where work was more plentiful. Early on Elisabeth became aware of the harsh realities of life in the west.

“A fella went to get off a horse and got his foot caught in a stirrup and the horse kicked him to death. And I stood there and watched that. It’s always been a terrible thing for me to remember.” 

Life in a mining down was filled with both excitement and tragedy. Elisabeth was twelve when the Speculator Mine accident occurred.

“When anything went wrong inn town, or when anything was good all the mine whistles would blow. New Year’s Eve, everything in town, you could hardly hear yourself thinking. Every mine whistle. And every mine had a big whistle, and if anything went wrong every one of those mines would start their whistles going. There was a big fire and there were a lot of people killed. I don’t remember, I was about twelve, everyone was walking around wringing their hands and crying because many of them had men working in that mine. I can’t remember how many were killed but there were a lot, it was a big fire. And I can’t remember which mine it was right now either. I know Papa went up there, all the men went up to stand around and watch and see if they could help. That was the worst one I think we ever had but after that every once in a while you’d hear the whistles go and you’d know that there’d be one or two men. There was often one man killed, it was dangerous down there. They’d blast and wouldn’t get out of the way in time or there’d be a cave in that would cover them up or something like that. Or a couple of times the cage going down would break and drop down and kill several men. So there was always bad accidents.”

Elisabeth also provides vivid recollections of the bustling mining city when times were booming.

“All the time I was growing up in Butte it was a real teeming city. Interesting things going on, lots of people on the streets all the time. No cars, but people, lots of people. We had lots of theaters and people would pour out of them around eleven thirty. Lots and lots of people, hundreds of them. And then they would either go into the little ice cream parlors and have ice cream or they’d go into a fancy store and buy Ice cream and cookies and cake to take home. So they were really busy around eleven and twelve o’clock n Butte at night. There were always people on the street, miners worked in three shifts so there were always miners going and miners coming, so the street was always and pedestrians. We had street cars then…”

Her memories of her teen years included ice-skating in winter every day after school, going to the Columbia Gardens and picking pansies in summer, and seeing the exciting Ringling Brothers Circus and parade. Her mother did not work, and Elisabeth remembers the limiting circumstances for those who did.

“Well women didn’t work in those days unless they just had to. If their husband was sick or dead then they would get to work, but there wasn’t too much work for women. Y’know you’d have, well washing and ironing for somebody else or cleaning their houses or if you worked in a store you couldn’t be married. If you got married they let you go. Clerks, clerks and teachers couldn’t be married. So there really wasn’t any work for women and unless they had to work to support a family, they just didn’t work. No relief either. I don’t know what people did, because there was no social security, no relief. I guess if you were starving the county took care of you, gave you something. Not much.”

When she was 15, Elisabeth met Matt Christy at the market where he worked. He was hard-working, young Yugoslavian immigrant from Dubrovnik. They married in 1923, and embarked on a profitable but demanding business as grocery store owners during the heyday of Butte’s mining industry. 

During Prohibition their first store on Granite and Crystal became the target of moonshiners. 

“Its was during the war and sugar was scarce, everything was being rationed, and they broke into our store and stole fifteen sacks of sugar which was a real, at that time that was a real loss. It was hard to get it and it was expensive. So we fixed up a little apartment in the back of the store and moved into that. Until George was born and then we got a real nice apartment down the street. At that time, this craze, they were making moonshine I think and that’s why they stole the sugar.”

With a son and a daughter born in 1926 and 28, the Christy’s moved to the 600 block of West Galena just ahead of the Depression.

 In those days, Butte ’s more than 200 neighborhood stores offered charge accounts to their local customers. Without the kind of social safety net in place today, customers turned to those stores for help when times were bad.

“We went into debt, borrowed money, to feed our customers. Some of them to this day are very, very grateful and are always saying how much they appreciated it. Some of them just picked up and left and never did pay their bills, the heck with the people that were dumb enough to give it to you, y’know? But, we recovered. It took quite a while for us to recover from that. We borrowed and we weren’t making any money, you see? We were giving it all out. The depression was pretty bad.”

Copper prices plummeting and miners out of work, Elisabeth witnessed first hand the economic downturn’s devastating impact on her neighbors. She and her husband did what they could to help.

“People just stayed home, the men were just so downhearted and so discouraged because they couldn’t get jobs. Some of them would get on railroad trains, ride the rods to another city which didn’t have any work either. It was down all over, the whole United States. Butte we thought was worst off of all. I had a cousin up in Canada who wrote me and said there was no work up there and did we have any work here. Well we didn’t have any work here for nobody. People were just having a very, very bad time. When the market crash came in 1929 we had just bought our house and paid for it thank God. We had paid cash so we had the house, we didn’t lose it, taxes and insurance weren’t so high in those times and you didn’t pay very much. There was no social security and income taxes were very low so we got along that way alright. But many people would have to go down and scrounge out wood and pick up coal from around the coal yard, do things like that to keep warm. They really did have an awfully bad time.”

Once World War II began, the economy recovered, and the Christy’s opened a second store, called Waldorf’s Market, in the heart of Butte on Park Street. Life as a grocery owner meant keeping the store open for the convenience of customers, so vacations or time off were limited.

Elisabeth’s activities were also restricted by her developmentally disabled son, whose care was her first priority. Still, she was a member of the First Presbyterian Church, active in the PEO Sisterhood, and secretary of the Republican Club for many years. An avid seamstress who could make her own clothes, she enjoyed needlepoint, and decorated eggshells that were sold in their store.

“After my son got sick we went out in the country to visit somebody and he seemed to feel better out there and eat better, he was five at that time. So Matt said, “I’ll get some land here and we’ll build a cabin too.” So we had a beautiful cabin up on Georgetown Lake and every time we had ten minutes off we went there. We would go out, we’d close the store Sunday but I’d have everything ready to go and we’d go out Saturday night. In the summertime, when it was warm in July and August, the kids and I would stay out there. Matt would come in and commute. He didn’t really commute every day he would come in Monday morning and then he came out Wednesday night, the tThursday morning and come back Saturday night again. We did that for many years.”

The stable economy of the fifties allowed the practical Christy’s to invest wisely, and without anyone in the family able to take over, they closed their businesses in 1961. The Georgetown cabin would become a summer getaway in retirement.

“After we quit work we went out there and stayed all summer. I loved it, it broke my heart when Matt sold it.”

When Elisabeth’s husband died in 1985, her daughter had long since married, and moved with her family to Florida. Elisabeth chose to remain in Butte with her son in the familiar home where they had lived for more than five decades.

Three years later, one November morning after breakfast, leaving the dishes on the table, Elisabeth Christy and her son in his best coat went out to the garage where they died together. Their obituaries read:  “Mrs. Christy and her son George were found dead in a car having died of apparent carbon monoxide poisoning.” 

A stalwart of the business community and a deeply devoted, caring mother, her friends were shocked and stricken at the news. They could only speculate about what led to Mrs. Christy’s final decision, whether she acted out of despair or love, maybe both. She was 85 years old, her son 62. 

Perhaps her own words provide a clue:

“We’re the last leaf on the tree I guess…”