Antique 1910s Leys Jeweler Check 🪙 Butte Montana Mining Boomtown Ephemera

Who Shopped at Leys Jewelers? 🪙 Antique 1910s Check, Butte Montana Mining Boomtown

Size: 8 1/2" x 3 1/8" ~ Little to no wear.

🪙 A Jeweler's Check From the Richest Hill on Earth

🪙 This is a business check from Leys, Jeweler, of Butte, Montana, drawn on the First National Bank of Butte. I love how much of the old town fits on one slip of paper. The jeweler's name runs across the top, the bank's name and a little printed transit number sit along the bottom, and tucked into the left corner is a tiny engraving of the bank's own building, with early motorcars and a streetcar out front. These went through the bank for real: written out by hand, signed, stamped and punch-cancelled when they were paid.

💎 James Leys, Alexander Christie and the Biggest Jewelry Store in Montana

The store's story starts with a Scottish jeweler and his brother-in-law. Alexander S. Christie was born in Portsoy, Banffshire, in 1860. He was apprenticed to a jeweler at fourteen, put in five years learning the trade and one more as a journeyman, and landed in America in August 1881. He set up shop in Marion, Kansas, and later took his brother-in-law, James D. Leys, in as a partner. Christie had married Agnes Shepard Leys in New York in 1887.

In 1888 Leys headed west to Butte and opened the Leys Jewelry Company. The 1913 History of Montana says it was one of the town's three leading jewelry houses from the day it opened, and that it soon left the other two behind. Christie sold the Kansas store in 1891 and moved to Butte to help run things. In 1897 the partners went into the wholesale trade as well. Leys moved to New York and opened the firm's headquarters at 65 Nassau Street, and Christie ran the Butte store from then on.

For seventeen years the store stood at the northeast corner of Main and Park. Then it moved into bigger, fancier quarters at 20 North Main, and by 1913 the county history was calling it the largest retail establishment of its kind in the state. Christie had his fingers in plenty of Butte pies. He had money in the Haskins Drug Company, sat on the board of the Silver Bow National Bank, held mining interests, and was a past master of Silver Bow Lodge No. 48 of the Masons.

🏛️ The Christies on Main Street

Christie's oldest son, Colin Leys Christie, was born in Marion in 1888, the same year his uncle opened in Butte, and by 1913 he was on the road for the New York branch. He became a certified gemologist and ended up managing the Butte store. He married Ruth Lindsay, the daughter of Judge John Lindsay, who had come to Butte in 1895 as Marcus Daly's lawyer. Colin ran Leys until he retired in 1965, and that's when the store closed, still at 20 North Main.

Butte's local historians think Leys probably got its foothold on Main Street by buying out an earlier jeweler, David Goldberg, who was out of the trade by 1893. A faded Leys ghost sign still survives on a wall in the block between Park and Broadway, where the store did business for so many years.

🏦 The First National Bank of Butte

The bank printed at the bottom of these checks has quite a story too. Andrew Jackson Davis came into Montana with the 1863 gold rush as a merchant, not a miner. In 1866 he and Samuel Hauser started a private bank in Helena, and on February 6, 1877, Davis put up most of the money for a Butte branch. In 1881 it became the First National Bank of Butte. That same year Davis sold the Lexington Mine for a million dollars in cash, which probably made him Montana's first millionaire.

When he died in 1890, he left the bank to his nephew and namesake, Andy Davis, who had to win a hard court fight to keep it and then ran it until 1941. The old bank building at 127 North Main came through Butte's great fire of 1889, but the business outgrew it. In 1909 the bank moved a block south into a new Greek Revival building at Main and Broadway, designed by Link and Haire and enlarged in 1915. That's the building engraved in the corner of these checks, cars and all, and it still stands at 101 North Main, with the 1877 founding date on its face.

My favorite bank story comes from the Depression. In the wave of voluntary bank closings just before the 1933 Bank Holiday, E. G. Leipheimer's history of the bank says the First National of Butte was one of only three banks in the country that stayed open. When it reopened after the four-day federal shutdown, the tellers' cages were stacked high with currency. Local historians suspect that was as much a show of confidence as anything, and what a show it was. In 1967 the bank merged with the Daly National Bank of Anaconda under Northwest Bancorporation.

🔢 That Little "93-2" Dates the Paper

Under the bank's name is a small printed "93-2". That's the bank's number in the American Bankers Association transit system, which clerks used to sort checks coming in from out of town. The ABA worked the system out in 1910, and its Executive Council adopted it in Nashville on May 2, 1911. The states got prefix numbers 50 through 99, and Montana's was 93. So this check stock was printed after the system came in. The date line is already printed "191_", and the writer just filled in the last digit. That puts these squarely in the 1910s.

📜 Each One Is Its Own Little Piece of Butte Business

Payees, amounts, dates, stamps and signatures change from check to check, so the one in my photos may not be the one you get. Every one of them is a real transaction from a Butte jeweler's books, paid out through one of the town's great banks.

The supply is finite - once these last Leys, Jeweler checks are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.