Daly Mansion

Marcus Daly arrived in Montana Territory in 1876, sent by New York banking friends to find and invest in silver mining. He bought and sold interests in dozens of claims until he acquired one that unexpectedly gushed a rich copper vein just as the world was hungry for copper to carry electricity. Daly built the smelter city of Anaconda and grew immensely wealthy, becoming one of the three Copper Kings whose battles over mining, politics, and even the location of the state capital defined Montana's early years.

In 1886 Daly bought a homestead in the Bitterroot Valley as a family summer retreat and, over the following years, transformed it. By 1896 he had raised an imposing Queen Anne mansion on the site. After his death, his widow Margaret took the house in hand, and in a major remodel finished around 1910 she reshaped it into the elegant Georgian-revival form it wears today, a three-story, twenty-four-thousand-square-foot house with twenty-five bedrooms, fifteen bathrooms, and seven fireplaces, five of them faced in imported Italian marble.

Riverside was only the heart of something far larger. Daly poured part of his fortune into the Bitterroot Stock Farm, a sprawling operation of ranch land, orchards, gardens, a deer park, and both outdoor and covered race tracks, all built to breed and race champion thoroughbred horses. He loved the sport, and one horse above all.

His favorite was a thoroughbred named Tammany. Before a celebrated 1893 match race against an eastern rival, Daly is said to have declared that if Tammany won, he would build him a castle. Tammany won by four lengths, and Daly kept his word, raising an ornate stable known as Tammany Castle to house his prized horses in luxury. It is the kind of story that captures the man: a mine worker turned baron with the money and the flair to build a palace for a horse, and it hangs over the whole estate to this day.

After the Daly family's era ended, the great house could easily have been lost, as so many Gilded Age mansions were. Instead, a preservation trust was formed and the mansion opened to the public in 1987, and it has been cared for as a public historic site ever since. Recognized as a National Register landmark and often called the largest residence in Montana, it now welcomes visitors for guided and self-guided tours that move through the grand rooms and tell the family's story.

Around the house spread the grounds of the Margaret Daly Memorial Arboretum, forty-plus acres of manicured lawn shaded by dozens of species of mature and rare trees that Margaret planted a century ago, now grown to full and stately size. Between the marble fireplaces indoors and the cathedral of old trees outside, a visit is both a history lesson and a quiet pleasure, and unlike the private empire it once anchored, all of it is now open to anyone willing to drive up the valley to see it.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.