On August 25, 1906, R.B. Hughes, E.P. Dungan, and Harry Y. Gephart, incorporated the Triangle Mining and Development Company in Missoula, Montana, with $500,000 in capital stock. By 1910 the value of the company's shares had increased to $1.2 million, but their success in raising capital does not seem to have been matched in production. The only evidence of production appears in the Montana Mine Inspector's Reports, 1909-1912, describing the development of a two compartment shaft and 500 feet of tunnels. A company brochure describes the company as a collection of eleven copper-silver-gold mining claims located just east of Missoula near Clinton, a townsite at East Clinton, a millsite along the Northern Pacific and Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul mainlines, and water power from Rock Creek. Although company financial records exist up to 1923, the company does not appear in the Missoula City Directory after 1916. In addition to mining, the company seems to have had interest in real estate, and a number of smaller mining companies. One of the principals throughout the life of the company, Harry Y. Gephart, a native of Pennsylvania, also served as Missoula City Treasurer during the 1910s.
This collection contains incoming, interoffice, and outgoing correspondence, employment records, financial records, legal documents, minutes, organizational records, printed materials, and reports. The correspondence (1906-1923) does not provide much information about the company operations, rather it is dominated by legal/property-related correspondence. The Financial Records (1906-1923), consisting of ledgers, journals, cashbooks, and invoices, provide the only means of reconstructing the mining operations, since there are no production records or engineering reports. The Legal Document records (1906-1923) include--mining claims, deeds, titles, contracts, leases, water rights, and wills/probates--which do document the creation of a corporation but do not shed any light on operations. The same applies to the Organization series, which includes stock certificates, stockholder ledgers, and articles of incorporation, but tells the researcher nothing about the daily operations of the company. There are fourteen separate small subgroups, consisting of a variety of personal papers and organizational records for other companies. The subgroups include A.K. Andersen (1913-1917), B.P.O.E. (1924-1950), Buffalo Mining Company (1915-1917), Calumet Clinton Copper Company (1909), Patsy H. Duffy (1913), East Clinton Townsite Company (1901), Harry Y. Gephart (1898-1922), O. P. Jackson (1898-1911), Hiram Knowles (1911), V. Sherwood Kutchin (1909-1913), David Lagasse (1911), Missoula Metal Milling Company (1913), Ray-Jefferson Mining Company (1910), Ten Doy Mining Company (1915), and John Wood (1908-1912).
by subgroup and series
available upon request
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the Montana Historical Society Archives catalog. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons, or places should search under these terms.
The following section contains a detailed listing of the materials in the collection