In 1910, amid a business boom in Hamilton praised by the Ravalli Republic for producing better-class buildings, the First National Bank building replaced two wooden structures that had housed a general store and Hamilton’s first hospital in the mid-1890s. The new masonry building included inexpensive apartments on its second floor, while its first-floor façade expressed its dual role as a bank and store: large display windows with an aluminum mullion frame marked Hub Clothing on the south half of the block, and double-hung windows accented by brick voussoirs adorned the more formal bank frontage. F. H. Drinkenberg, president of First National Bank and part owner of Hub Clothing, was also Hamilton’s mayor in 1910, and his investments in this building and two other Second Street business blocks built in 1909-1910 reflected his confidence in the town’s future.