the iconic
Grubstake Building
by Melissa Ruch
I
t’s an icon on Elk Avenue, the bright red Grubstake Building at the corner of Third and Elk. For well more than one hundred years, the Grubstake Building has been an anchor for the town, complete with its own character and stories of the characters inside. The original structure housed a bank, a meat market and a news office, according to an 1886 Sanborn map. But in 1890 a widespread fire destroyed the entire building. After the fire, three individual but adjoining buildings were erected. In the 1930s a big over-roof was built over all three for protection. In 1960 the separate buildings effectively became one. Looking up at the building you can see the words “Bank” and “Drugs” signifying some the earliest, most notable businesses that took up residence. Molly Minneman, the town’s Historic Preservation Coordinator notes that having Crested Butte’s first bank in the Grubstake Building “was really a validation that Crested Butte was financially viable and here to stay.” The locally owned bank inside the Grubstake Building was a sign of Crested Butte’s standing as a new town. According to George Sibley’s Crested Butte Primer, “One of the central institutions in any town is its bank. The bank of Crested Butte dated from the earliest days of the town, opening August 9, 1880–a month after the incorporation of the town.”
32 | www.thepeakcb.com | 2011
1980s Grubstake.
photo by
Sandra Cortner
For decades, next to the bank in the middle section of the building there was a drugstore as well. At one time in the 1920s the last section of the building became a mortuary; before that it served as a space for the post office. In 1958, according to Sibley’s Primer, Bill Whalen sold the three buildings he had put under one room in the early 1930s to Phil and Lillian Hyslop, who proceeded to remodel the three and turn them into one building. In 1961, the Hyslops opened the building as the Grubstake Restaurant, the name that sticks today. The restaurant and building went through numerous owners in the next four decades. Sandra Cortner first came to Crested Butte in 1964. Her family rented the Bishop House, now the Dogwood, right behind the Grubstake Building. She remembers going to the Grubstake Restaurant for meals with her family. And since their house was so close, she would run from the restaurant home to check on her sleeping baby brother. “It was a down-home kind of place, very small-town kind of café,” she explains. But her favorite memory of the building is the Miss Grubstake contest in 1980, when she took the title. Cortner remembers the ad that then-restaurant owner Judy Naumburg placed in the local newspapers: “Enter the Ms. Grubstake Contest. Swimsuit, Evening Gown, and Talent Categories. Judges’ Questions. Win Fame, Fortune and $150 Cash!”