Daly Mansion

Marcus Daly, the Irish immigrant who built the Anaconda Company out of the Butte hill and founded the smelter town of Anaconda, also founded Hamilton, to saw lumber for his mines. In 1886 he bought the Anthony Chaffin homestead east of the river and grew it into the Bitter Root Stock Farm, more than 22,000 acres where he kept some 1,200 horses, among them the racehorse Tammany. Daly had said that if Tammany beat Lamplighter he would build the horse a castle; Tammany won by four lengths, and the barn Daly built for him is still called Tammany Castle.

Daly died in November 1900, before the house became what it is now. His widow, Margaret, ran the stock farm herself and in 1909 hired the architect A. J. Gibson to turn the farmhouse into a Georgian Revival mansion; it was finished in August 1910, three stories and some 24,000 square feet with a columned portico looking west across the valley to the Bitterroot Range. She called it Riverside and spent summers here until her death in 1941.

Then the house was shut and boarded up with much of its contents inside. It stayed that way for more than forty-five years, until the house passed to the state and a local trust opened it to the public in May 1987; Margaret's own bedroom furniture was later brought back from the University of Montana. Guided tours run through the main rooms.