Our Building

The Walkerville Grocery is housed in the historic Caplice & McCune Mercantile building, located at 1613 North Main Street in Walkerville, Montana. The building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, which describes the building as follows:

The masonry buildings in the heart of Walkerville reflect the town’s nineteenth-century silver-mining roots. Mining investors, the Walker Brothers of Salt Lake, and future copper king Marcus Daly began developing silver mines here in 1876. Joseph Broughton, another Salt Lake investor, likely built this substantial brick general store in 1880. By 1883, John Caplice and Alfred McCune acquired the building, and in 1884 emblazoned “Caplice & McCune” high on the south wall. Silver markets slumped in 1893, and by 1897, St. Lawrence Catholic Church, a branch of St. Patrick’s in Uptown Butte, temporarily held services here while building a new church nearby. It later used the building to house St. Joseph’s Parochial School. In 1905, Mount Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church acquired and remodeled the building, adding pointed arch windows in the auditorium, a central meeting room, and a rear, six-room apartment for the pastor. The congregation was always small compared to Mountain View Methodist in Uptown Butte, and for many years it shared pastors with Centerville, Silver Bow Park, Wesley Chapel, and Meaderville. Despite their limited numbers, Walkerville Methodists worshipped here until 1972.

Our team has been working to stabilize and renovate the building since 2017. After nearly a half-century of neglect and abandonment, the building was ready to collapse and was a candidate for demolition after the roof blew off in 2012. The pictures below demonstrate some of the work we’ve put into the building since we started on the project back in 2017.