Finberg's Furniture Store

French-Canadian brothers founded the Nadeau Investment Company in the late 1800s and amassed Butte real estate, much of it red-light properties that made the family wealthy. Their holdings at the height of Butte’s tenderloin included the far-famed Mercury Street Dumas Hotel and the Copper Block at Wyoming and Galena.

The Nadeaus also owned legitimate commercial real estate like this property they purchased in 1886; portions of MT NATIONAL REGISTER SIGN TEXT 1990 TO APRIL 2019 the present building date to circa 1885. In 1927, the Nadeaus remodeled the façade. The buff brick in a herringbone pattern with diamond and triangle concrete insets speaks to the 1920s trend toward subtle ornamentation.

By 1928, E. J. McMahon’s cigar store and the Central Café occupied the ground floor. The Olympia Club, a soft drink parlor likely disguising a speakeasy, operated in the rear during Prohibition. Russian Jewish immigrant Samuel Finberg moved his furniture store to this location in 1932 where he became a local fixture, eventually purchasing the building from the Nadeaus in 1946.

Finberg was in business here until he handed over the store to his son in 1966.