Last Chance Gulch Helena historic district
— — a gold-strike gulch that became a main street.
Not only on a wall.
“The walking street that bends where the creek used to run. In July of 1864 four Georgia prospectors washed their last pan here and named the gulch for the chance they almost didn't take. The town grew up along the bend, brick and granite Victorians stacked tight against the hillside, the Cathedral of Saint Helena pointing up from a few blocks east. The street still bends the way the water did. Locals shop the same curve placer miners followed in. from the studio
Last Chance Gulch Helena historic district, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Last Chance Gulch is the historic main street of Helena, Montana, tracing the curve of the creek where four prospectors known as the Four Georgians struck gold on July 14, 1864. The strike turned a temporary camp into a permanent town and, by 1875, the territorial capital. The street follows the original placer ground for roughly seven blocks through downtown, lined with late-Victorian commercial buildings of brick and Helena granite. A pedestrian mall section was added in 1976, closing part of the gulch to cars and giving the curve back to walkers.
The downtown stretch carries one of the densest collections of late-nineteenth-century commercial architecture in the northern Rockies. Helena granite quarried from the surrounding foothills faces many of the older fronts, with pressed brick above and cast-iron storefronts at street level. The 230-foot Power Block of 1889 still anchors one corner, and the twin spires of the Cathedral of Saint Helena, finished in 1914, rise a few blocks east in a French Gothic line. The Pioneer Cabin, dated to 1864, sits a short walk off the gulch as the city's oldest surviving structure.
The gulch runs through downtown Helena and is open as a public street year-round, with the pedestrian section between roughly 6th Avenue and Grand closed to traffic. Summer brings the Alive at Five concert series on Wednesday evenings from June through August, and the Last Chance Tour Train loads near the Great Northern Town Center a few blocks west. Parking is metered along the open stretches and free in the city garage at Park Avenue. The Montana Historical Society sits two blocks east on Roberts Street and holds the Charles M. Russell collection.