Danforth Block

A wood-frame cigar factory and shooting gallery stood here in 1884. After fire destroyed the buildings in 1886, owner J. A. Danforth quickly rebuilt in brick. Four years later, he added a second story, but the addition was so heavy it damaged the first floor. In 1891, he remodeled, adding iron support columns to carry the weight.

The flamboyant Gilded Age business block features a distinctively corbelled (projecting) brick cornice that evokes the top of a fortress. For much of the building’s history, the second floor housed club and card rooms while a saloon filled the first floor. Bar owners included Democratic political “boss” John Hogan, who came to Livingston as a Northern Pacific “road master” and then went into sheep ranching.

Hogan purchased the building in 1914, and his ghost sign still marks the north façade’s second story. In 1927, during Prohibition, Herman Bauer, a union activist blackballed by the railroad as an “agitator,” opened a soft drink parlor. Antlers Bar opened in 1937, four years after Prohibition’s repeal.

It operated until 1967.