Montana’s Prettiest Painted Town

Nestled in the foothills on the edge of broad and spacious Flint Creek Valley, surrounded by mountains laden in past times with vast deposits of silver, manganese, sapphires, and to a lesser extent gold, beautiful historic Philipsburg is an anomaly because it's still standing. As one of twenty rowdy mining communities that once thrived within thirty miles of here only “P-burg” withstood the test of time. Battered and bruised and knocked down by devastating booms-and-busts endemic to that world of hard rock mining, Philipsburg kept getting up, dusted itself off and dug in for the long haul. Granite, Tower, Rumsey, Black Pine and all the rest, home to thousands of scruffy men in those late 19th and early 20th century glory days, have vanished. Things quieted in their wake leaving us blank spots on a map or relics to ponder; crumbling foundations and rotting timbers and disintegrating piles of brick. These haunts of fanciful apparitions are a repository of story, gripping tales of hard-working men calloused inside and out, toiling twelve deadly hours each and every day, seven days a week under miserable conditions down there in the dark.

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