A photo quiz making the rounds in local history circles this week shows three houses photographed in the 1890s and asks a deceptively simple question: where are they, and what was the street originally called?
The image, shared by the Helena as She Was history group, is the kind of puzzle that tends to draw a crowd in a city where dozens of Victorian-era homes still line the neighborhoods above Last Chance Gulch. The answer, organizers said, would be posted the following day.
Helena's late-nineteenth-century streetscape is unusually intact for a western city of its size, a product of both the wealth generated by the gold rush and subsequent silver and lead mining booms, and the stubbornness of residents who fought successive rounds of urban renewal. The quiz is an informal reminder that a lot of that history is still visible — if you know where to look.