The False Front on Wallace Street

The false-front store on Wallace Street in Virginia City, Montana, is a wall of planed pine that stands a story taller than the roof behind it. From the board sidewalk it reads as a building of two full floors: a double-step cornice across the top, a band of squared letters carrying the store's name, and below that the true storefront, two sash windows and the door recessed between them. The roof leans against the back of the board halfway up, and everything above that line is wall only—a flat screen with air behind it. At midday the cornice throws a straight shadow across the lettering.

Clapboards run horizontal, edge over edge, nailed to heavier posts that carry the load down into the ground. Cut nails, square-shanked, hold the seams in rows rusted to brown streaks beneath the paint. The cornice is a shallow box of the same pine, projecting over the lettering like a hat brim. The letters are painted directly on the boards, overpainted so many times that the ghost of an older name shows through at the corner of a newer one. The sash windows are deep-set, their frames painted to match the wall, their glass old enough to bend the street into slow waves. Between them the door stands a step back from the face of the wall, its iron latch worn bright at the thumb.

A false front supports nothing. The board is pure face, and its only work is to be seen. When Virginia City was a new gold camp, a merchant could set a one-room store behind such a wall and show the street a clean, painted, two-story establishment, out-facing the log cabins on either side without spending real labor on rooms he did not need. A false front cost a stack of lumber, a day of nailing, and a can of paint, and the store behind it could still be canvas and chinked logs for another season. Height was the cheapest thing a man could buy, and it was bought with boards.

It was built fast, in the years when the town was the territorial capital of Montana, and it has never been replaced. When the gold gave out, Virginia City did not burn the way other gold towns burned, and no one tore down the tall faces because no one had the money to build better. The same wall stood through the flat years, taking a new coat of paint every so often, the lettering repainted over the old until the earlier name pushed through the later one like a bruise. Beneath the present coat, the paint layers hold the colors the board wore when the street was new.

The man who runs the store props the door open on summer mornings before the heat reaches the boardwalk. A painter stands a stepladder on the sidewalk once a year and works the band of lettering, matching the old strokes, following the old edges. In winter the snow leans against the lower clapboards, and a dark line shows where it melts at the base of the wall. The wind loosens the corner of a cornice board, and the year's first rain finds the opened seam.

The grain of the pine has risen in ribs under the paint, and the paint has cracked along those ribs in hairline seams from the cornice down to the door's step.

Virginia City, Montana