423 North Jackson, Butte, Montana or My Grandmother's House

The three of us, my sister Dianne, nephew Eamon and I, were standing on Jackson Street in front of what had once been my Grandmother Egan's house. I took a photograph to document our presence as reflected in the window, the second and third generation descendants of my immigrant grandparents who had first purchased the house nearly a hundred years before. 

As child, I did not visit my grandmother often, even though it was walking distance from our house on Woolman. One afternoon, I did get in trouble for an attempted visit when I walked over to see her, without permission, across a busy street and past the Anselmo mine which was still operating in those days. She wasn't home so I went to her sister Hannah's house a few blocks away where she gave me cookies and called my mother. 

Mary Egan, née Sullivan, was a quiet, determined woman. Widowed in 1926 at age 32, she was left to raise her two sons on her own. My father, James, was five years old and my uncle Edmund, just one, when their father died of consumption at 44, a common death for hard rock miners in those days.  

I try to imagine what she was like as young woman. In the one portrait I have of her she is pretty with light eyes, her thick hair piled high in the fashion of the times. Her oldest brother Michael had immigrated from the family farm in Ardgroom, County Cork in 1906, she followed him to Butte six years later. Where did she meet my grandfather? Were they introduced by mutual friends, or did they meet at an Irish dance, perhaps a pattern dance, like the one her niece and nephew, my second cousins, Mary and Michael Sullivan, took me to in London in the 70's? 

A handsome man from County Limerick, Jerry Egan had a good job in the mines. He was successful enough to purchase the house on Jackson Street for his bride when they married in 1919. It was a solid residence with room for the family life they planned. Plans cut short by his early death. His active membership in the Robert Emmet Literary Association, Butte's chapter of the Irish nationalist Clan na Gael, would have no doubt have provided some support for his widow and children, as it was also a fraternal organization that offered monetary assistance to its members in times of need. But it was the house that would help to support my grandmother as she raised her boys through the hard years of the Depression.

She rented out a lower floor space to boarders, and when her brother Mike moved in to help her out, she moved herself to a daybed in the dining room to make space for her sons and brother in the upstairs bedrooms. When she had to, she did day work for wealthy families. She was frugal and hard-working, but there were few frills for the family. I do not remember the house as a joyful place. The interior was dark with old fashion furnishings and Irish Nationalist prints hung high on the walls. 

My last visit with my grandmother was in the summer in the summer of 1962, we had moved to California four years before and my Uncle Eddy had taken my brother Jimmy and me on a road trip to the World's Fair in Seattle and on to Butte to see family. In the mornings, I sat in her kitchen chatting happily, drinking tea, and eating soda bread. At night I slept in my father's former bedroom where I found Goodbye Mr. Chips on the nightstand and read myself to sleep.

It had been over 20 years since the last time I saw the house, the last time I was there with my father. It was already in rough shape. My father spoke briefly with a neighbor and later reminisced with my sister and me about what it was like to grow-up there. Now the place was badly deteriorated, perhaps beyond repair. Camera in hand, I tried to capture the house in an almost abstract fashion, looking at the way the light hit the bricks and peaked through the damaged ceiling inside. Focusing on the large window allowed me to shoot what had been the living and dining rooms and, at the same time, to capture our reflection in the glass. It seemed important to record the existence of this house, this once solid home that would most certainly be gone on my next visit.