Helena's 1905 private club, rebuilt after the 1903 arson fire and reopened to the public as a restaurant in 2025.
24 W 6th Ave, Helena, MT 59601
Research updated September 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$
Cocktails and dinner at the Rathskeller and 1885 restaurant run upscale; the club's site doesn't post fixed menu prices.
Access
Wheelchair OK
Six-story 1905 downtown clubhouse with a cellar bar, ground-floor dining rooms, and upper floors.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1905 · Founded 1885, Montana Territory · 1903 Fire and Cass Gilbert Reconstruction · Longtime Private Club Between Minneapolis and Seattle
A group of Montana Territory business leaders — bankers, mining magnates, attorneys, and timber barons — founded the Montana Club in Helena in 1885 as a private gentlemen's club. Its first purpose-built home, designed by architects John C. Paulsen and John LaValle, opened in 1893 on a triangular lot bought from Samuel T. Hauser.
On April 28, 1903, that building burned. The fire was later traced to the 14-year-old son of the club's own bartender, who had set smaller fires before and said he wanted to see the horses pulling the fire engine run. He was sent to reform school; his father kept his bartending job for years afterward. The blaze gutted every floor above the first.
The club rebuilt on the same footprint, hiring architect Cass Gilbert — later known for the U.S. Supreme Court building — along with George H. Carsley to design a terracotta-clad replacement. It opened in 1905 at a cost exceeding $120,000, using granite from the Baxendale quarry and brick from Western Clay Manufacturing, with a lobby mosaic drawing on Native American good-fortune symbolism.
The club ran as a private membership organization for more than a century, becoming a condominium association in 1980 and reorganizing as a cooperative that opened its dining rooms to the public in 2018. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in November 2023 and closed in March 2024. California businessman Ajitpal Pannu bought the six-story building in 2025, and its cellar bar, the Rathskeller, reopened to the public on May 1, 2025.
Sources
The Montana Club has never advertised itself as haunted, but Helena's ghost-tour scene claims it anyway. Montana historian Ellen Baumler gave the club its own chapter — titled "Secrets of the Montana Club" — in her 2009 book Montana Chillers: 13 True Tales of Ghosts and Hauntings, published by Farcountry Press. The book doesn't publish its contents online, so the specific claims stay behind the cover.
The Foundation for Montana History includes the club as a stop on its seasonal "Ghost Gulch" haunted pub trolley tour, run alongside stops at Reeder's Alley, the west-end Mansion District, and Grandstreet Theater. The tour groups these downtown Helena buildings together more as a walking history of the city's oldest blocks than as a documented account of any one haunting inside the club itself.
What the club does have on the record is a building that burned to its foundation in 1903 and was rebuilt around that loss — the kind of history that tends to attach itself to ghost stories whether or not anyone can point to a specific sighting.
Media Appearances
Drop into the below-ground Rathskeller, the club's speakeasy-style bar, for cocktails built from 1920s recipes attributed to bartender Julian Anderson. No reservation is needed for the bar; walk-ins are welcome during posted hours (hours vary by source; call ahead to confirm).
The club's third-floor Garden Room and ground-floor 1885 restaurant serve à la carte dining, private dining, and events inside the 1905 clubhouse; book ahead through the club's reservation page.
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