Creighton’s Stone Block, Virginia City, and Montana’s First Telegraph Line

[Montana--Virginia City]: [CARTE-DE-VISITE PHOTOGRAPH OF CREIGHTON’S STONE BLOCK, VIRGINIA CITY, MONTANA, LIKELY BY A. C. CARTER]. [N.p., n.d., but Virginia City, Montana, 1866-1867]. Mounted albumen photograph, 2 1/2 x 4 in. (6.5 x 10 cm). Annotated in pencil on verso by A. C. Carter. Fine.

Virginia City, Montana, was one of the great boom towns of the American West. Founded as Varina on June 16, 1863, the townsite was placed a mile south of the gold strike made on Alder Creek the previous month. The name Varina--in honor of Jefferson Davis’s wife--was rejected by a Connecticut judge with no taste for the prospectors’ southern sympathies. Instead he recorded the townsite as Virginia City, and within weeks it was home to thousands of miners and fortune seekers who seem to have cared little one way or the other. Montana did not yet exist; the place was still a part of the remote and sprawling Idaho Territory. But Montana gained territorial status in 1864, its first capitol at Bannock. The following year the capitol moved to Virginia City, where it remained for a decade. This rare and early image, taken by photographer A. C. Carter in 1866 or 1867, captures two important firsts: the city’s first quarried stone structure; and the telegraph pole that shared the territory’s first wired message with the outside world. Both reflect the labors of two remarkable men, brothers Edward and John Creighton .

The Creightons, Edward (1820-1874) and John (1831-1907), were born the fifth and ninth children, respectively, of Irish immigrants James and Bridget Hughes Creighton, who raised their large family in Licking County, Ohio. At the age of 20, Edward contracted to build a stage road from Wheeling, Virginia, to Springfield, Ohio, and although he completed several more contracts over the next few years, he soon grew interested in the new business of telegraph lines. Edward moved to Omaha, Nebraska, in 1857, winning contracts to set lines from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and to Omaha. About 1858 he became associated with the Western Union Company, and from November 1860 to October 1861, he and his crews surveyed the entire line of the first transcontinental telegraph from Omaha to Sacramento. Edward dug the hole for the very first post on July 2, 1861, and he was present for the completion of the line at Salt Lake City on October 24. In all, they had planted 27,500 poles and strung 2000 miles of iron wire. From here Edward turned his attention to railroads and banking, his acumen for which would make him one of the most successful businessmen in Omaha.

John, meanwhile, had joined Edward in Nebraska in 1856 and worked as a superintendent during construction of the transcontinental telegraph. After the line was complete, he rounded up all of the stray cattle from the workmen’s camps and used his profits from their sale to buy a wagon train of merchandise that he sold to Brigham Young for $20,000. With this capitol, he purchased 35 wagons filled with goods and headed north to Virginia City, where he opened a store supplying the swarms of miners and prospectors drawn to the gold strikes on Alder Creek. In 1864, shortly after his arrival, he paid Joseph Griffith and William Thompson to build a permanent block for his mercantile store. Made of local stone quarried by Griffith and Thompson themselves, Creighton’s Stone Block was a three-part, Romanesque-style row featuring nine semicircular arches, each with a pair of French doors. Its impressive appearance mirrored John’s own success.

In short time John Creighton was among the most prominent citizens of Virginia City. He was an early member of the famous Vigilance Committee that tasked itself with bringing justice and order to the lawless frontier, and he was appointed colonel in the volunteer militia organized by Acting Governor Thomas Meagher when it seemed that an Indian war was imminent. Then, in 1866, he commenced the work that guaranteed his place in Montana’s history. Montana Territory was among the most isolated parts of the American West in the mid-1860s. It was more than 1200 miles from the nearest railroad, and there were no telegraph lines linking its larger towns--Virginia City, Helena, and Bannock--to the outside world. John and Edward set about to end this. They obtained a contract with Western Union and on July 17 began laying out a telegraph line from Salt Lake City to Virginia City. By the end of October the line was complete, with the final post planted on Creighton’s Stone Block at the corner of Wallace and Van Buren streets. On October 27 the machine itself was installed in the store that John shared with his partner, Charles Ohle. Six days later, on November 2, Edward sent the first telegraph message from Salt Lake to Governor Green Clay Smith in Virginia City, inviting him to write President Johnson back east. Smith did so, but sent his second message to John Creighton, then in Utah with Edward: “We with pleasure hail the completion of your telegraph to this place and by this invite you to an entertainment to be given by your friends of this city, on your return here, as a slight compliment for the extraordinary energy which you have exhibited in the work” (Blake 1904:260-261). John sent a gracious reply, adding that “If I live, I will be there” (Blake 1904:261).

This carte-de-visite is an early image of Creighton’s Stone Block, with the famed telegraph pole--its three glass insulators clearly visible--positioned at the corner of the structure. There is no imprint on the verso, but the handwriting of a manuscript annotation reading “Creighton’s Stone Row—south side of Wallace St. Va. City, Mon. Ter.” is a precise match for the annotations from a contemporaneous CDV with the stamp of A. C. Carter’s Montana Picture Gallery, located on Jackson Street in Virginia City. Carter was practicing in Virginia City by at least as early as 1864 and maintained a photographic gallery there until April 1868. A group of men and boys mill about the storefronts, and we suspect that the man in the center of the image, sporting a thick black beard and wearing a long grey overcoat, suit, and broad-brimmed hat, is none other than John Creighton himself. Creighton was known for his beard. According to Boro and Read, he had observed while surveying and freighting that “the smooth-faced Indians seemed to respect and be a little in awe of the white man who had a long beard, so he decided to grow one for himself. It was reported that the Indians came to regard him as a mystic” (1991:27). The image shows good contrast and light tonality, with excellent detail; its condition is fine. Three comparable and contemporaneous CDVs have appeared at Heritage Auctions, two in 2007 (both with the stamp of A. C. Carter) and one in 2020. These images sold for prices between $2600 and $3100. We trace no other comparable examples at auction or in the history of the trade.

John Creighton would leave Virginia City and return to Omaha in early 1868, where he wed Sarah Wareham--younger sister of Edward’s wife, Mary--in June. Together, the Creightons continued to expand their business interests from grocery and mercantile sales to banking, stock raising, and freighting, each brother acquiring a considerable fortune. They were already among Omaha’s most generous philanthropists when Edward died unexpectedly of a stroke at the age of 54 in 1874. Mary endowed a college in his honor, now Creighton University, but followed Edward in death just two years later. Sarah died in 1888, after a long struggle with arthritis; she was only 47. Such losses may have turned John’s thoughts to the health sciences, for in 1892 he endowed the Creighton University School of Medicine. He died in Omaha on February 7, 1907, at the age of 76. And the Creighton Stone Block, now fully restored, anchors Virginia City’s modern historic district. A rare view of Virginia City at the height of its gold rush boom. (Robin Beck)

Relevant sources: Baumler, Ellen 1999 More than the Glory: Preserving the Gold Rush and Its Outcome at Virginia City. Montana: The Magazine of Western History 49(3): 64-75.

Barsness, Larry 1962 Gold Camp: Alder Gulch and Virginia City, Montana. Hastings House, New York.

Blake, Henry N. 1904 The First Newspaper of Montana. Contributions of the Historical Society of Montana, Vol. 5, pp. 253-272. Independent Publishing Company, Helena.

Boro, Carolyn J., and Beverley T. Mead 1991 A Century of Teaching and Healing, 1892-1992: The First One Hundred years of the Creighton University School of Medicine. Creighton University, Omaha, NE.

Palmquist, Peter E. and Thomas R. Kailbourn 2005 Pioneer Photographers of the Far West: A Biographical Dictionary, 1840-1865. Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, CA.