Distinctly Montana Magazine

S U M M E R 2 0 1 9 S P E C I A L S E C T I O N • M Y M O N T A N A H O M E 95 by BRIAN D'AMBROSIO G EORGE H. SHANLEY'S ARCHITECTURAL PHILOSOPHY WAS SUPERB IN ITS SIMPLICITY: to recognize and fill the need for longstand- ing design. When he died at age 85, he was already one of the state's most prominent architects, the designer of many of prime buildings in Great Falls as well as some of the major ones in Montana. He was a traditional architect who saw his vocation as synchronized training of hand and mind, of rea- soning and of imagination. Design, as he presented it, was the arrangement of the component parts combined with a nimbly executed symbolic flourish. He believed that the shaped environment needed to exemplify integrity and permanency and should be branded with their own legacy. George H. Shanley was born around the start of the Gilded Age in Crittendon County, Vermont, August 26, 1875, of Bernard C. (a contractor) and Mary Flynn Shanley (several sources list contrasting birth dates, but this is the one cited in his obituary). His parents, both of whom were born in Vermont of pioneer families, were of Irish stock. Shanley re- ceived the "ordinary common school educa- tion," as he once later described it, reared and educated in Burlington grade and high schools, and attended the University of Vermont. After graduation, Shanley landed in the Mid- West, where he studied architecture in the office of Gerhard A. Tenbusch, at Duluth, Minnesota. Tenbusch was born in Germany in 1866 and came to America at the age of 17. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and in the 1890s, he worked as a draftsman and later architect, eventually partnering with I. Vernon Hill. From Tensbusch, Shanley learned the fundamentals of the contemporary art styles popular in the country, from Queen Anne Style, to Beaux-Arts Revival, to modern- day variations of Gothic and Romanesque. Equipped with such knowledge and training, Shanley pressed West further still—he once said that he "originally came to Montana to help his father construct a barn near Glacier Park", he settled in Kalispell in 1898. In Kalispell, he co-formed the firm of Gibson & Shanley. His partner, Joseph Gibson, arrived a couple of years prior to a rough- hewn community of a few log cabins; he had built many of the town's earliest residences, including a large quantity of Craftsman-style cottages. Gibson & Shanley were prolific in the Kalispell area around the turn of the century, contributing to the development of the Queen Anne and Roman- esque-rich Kalispell Main Street Historic District. Among other distinctions, George Shanley is listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places as the designer of the Masonic Temple (built 1905, 241-245 Main Street) and Flathead County High School, in 1903. He moved to Butte in 1904, where he became associated THE ARCHITECTURAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF GEORGE H. SHANLEY Ursuline Academy

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