Antique Butte Tombstone Company Check ✨ 1920s–1930s Montana Mining Boomtown Ephemera

Who Carved Butte's Tombstones? ✨ Antique Butte Tombstone Company Check, 1920s–1930s, Montana

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

🪦 A Monument Company's Checkbook

I love paper like this because nobody meant to save it. These are real cancelled checks from the Butte Tombstone Co., "Monuments, Copings," drawn on the Metals Bank & Trust Company of Butte, Montana. Each one was written out by hand, signed, run through the bank, punched with the cancellation holes and stamped on the back. A little cross monument is printed up in the corner, which is about as on-brand as a check can get.

A coping, by the way, is the stone or concrete curb around a family plot. Monuments for the headstones, copings for the plot: that was the business.

🗂️ Two Printings, Two Decades

You pick which one you want, and each comes from a different printing of the company's checks:

• 1920s: the gray security-tint form with the year line printed 192_ and the phone number Telephone 391, printed by the Missoulian Publishing Co. of Missoula, Montana.
• 1930s: the green wavy safety-paper form with the year line printed 193_, the newer number Telephone 5095, and a Great Falls lithographer's imprint at the bottom.

Every check was filled in by hand, so the dates, payees, amounts and signatures are different on each one, and the one in my photos may not be the one you get.

⛏️ The Butte Tombstone Company

The company was incorporated in Butte on August 5, 1903, to make monuments, headstones, tombs, grave decorations, vaults, copings and fencing. By 1909 it had offices in Billings, Bozeman, Great Falls, Helena, Missoula and as far as Idaho Falls. From 1911 it belonged to two brothers, Albert and Charles Mooney, and their families ran it until 1967, when the general manager bought it. It finally closed in 1990, after 87 years. Its own records are kept today at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives.

🏦 The Bank on the Check

The Metals Bank & Trust Company came out of the oldest money in Butte. Its line runs back to Hoge, Brownlee & Co., founded in 1882, and to the bank of copper king Marcus Daly. In July 1920 the State Savings Bank was reorganized as the Metals Bank and Trust Company, in the building Cass Gilbert designed for it in 1906. So the bank name on both of these forms fits the 1920s and 1930s exactly.

And Butte itself needs no introduction to anybody who loves Western history: the copper camp on the "Richest Hill on Earth." Every one of these checks paid for ordinary business in that town, a slab of granite here, a plot curb there.

📏 Details

• Original cancelled Butte Tombstone Co. check on Metals Bank & Trust Company, Butte, Montana
• About 8 1/2" x 3"
• Choose the 1920s or the 1930s printing
• Hand-completed, signed, punch-cancelled and bank-stamped, each one different

🖼️ It makes a great small frame for a Montana or Butte family, a mining history shelf, or anyone who collects old bank paper. Two checks, one from each decade, side by side look terrific.