Philipsburg Burgers
The Philipsburg Burgers, based in Philipsburg, Montana, played a single professional season in 1892 and were the only minor league team the town ever fielded. They finished 22-23 under manager Charlie Hoover, a former major league catcher, in a league that lost a third of its teams before the year was out.
The nickname was not really a nickname. Period papers used Burghers and Burgers interchangeably, and both simply meant people from Philipsburg. The same convention covered the rest of the league, with the Bozeman club turning up as the Bozemans, and papers shortening Philipsburg itself to the 'Burg. Montana ball in 1892 had not yet arrived at the idea that a team needed a name of its own, and reference books later recorded the demonym as though it were one. Eight years later the state's papers were running columns campaigning for proper nicknames, which is how Butte ended up with Smoke Eaters and Anaconda with Serpents.
The 1892 Montana State League was a six-team Class B circuit that opened play on May 30 with clubs from Philipsburg, Bozeman, Butte, Great Falls, Helena and Missoula. It ran a split-season schedule. On July 23, at the end of the first half, both the Bozeman and Great Falls franchises disbanded on the same day, and the league finished the season with four clubs before folding entirely.
Philipsburg placed third in the final overall standings behind Helena at 29-21 and Butte at 26-22, and ahead of Missoula at 18-29. Butte won the first half and Helena the second, and Butte took the overall championship by default when the deciding game went unplayed in a dispute over withheld gate money. Philipsburg had been on the receiving end of the same treatment. Manager Titus spent that October trying to recover about $400 that Butte was holding back on what Helena's paper called a flimsy pretext.
The league adopted a salary limit of $200 per club per month at its organizing convention, and Philipsburg blew straight through it. In the second week of the season the Anaconda Standard reported that Philipsburg, Helena and Bozeman were each paying out between $500 and $700 a month, better than triple the cap, and that Great Falls and Missoula were over it too. Butte was the only club claiming to comply, with two paid men at $100 apiece. The Standard called the limit a dead letter from the start. A silver camp in the Flint Creek Valley, the smallest market in the league by a wide margin, was outspending the rule three times over inside a fortnight, and the league did not survive the season.
Philipsburg was a silver camp in the Flint Creek Valley, a boom town in 1892 with the Granite Mountain workings running at full tilt three miles up the canyon, and by a wide margin the smallest market ever to field a Class B club. In the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV.
