Life Underground Episode 5 - Get Off the Hill
Life Underground - Episode 005
“Get off the Hill”
This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and produced by KBMF 102.5FM and the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. I’m Clark Grant. This is episode 5: Get Off the Hill
Today we look at the transition from underground mining to the open pit, and we get a sense of how close Butte came to tearing itself apart to keep the Anaconda Company going.
Scene 1: Moving Forward
Butte, Montana is a model city, or at least it was. Back in the late 1960s, America’s biggest copper mining town was deteriorating. With unemployment rising and income levels dropping, the Economic Development Administration of the federal government, with urging from Senator Mike Mansfield, selected Butte as one of 150 cities nationwide to participate in the Model Cities program. President Lyndon Johnson, who launched Model Cities as part of his Great Society movement, called it "the most comprehensive urban development program this country has ever undertaken.” Butte received over $12,000,000 over five years to implement urban renewal programs from 1969-1974.
Former Butte Mayor Mike Micone knows about Model Cities; he helped administer the millions of dollars that were pouring into Butte at the time, and was the last mayor of Butte before the city and county consolidated. Teresa Jordan, who collected many oral histories in Butte in the 1980s, interviewed Micone in 1987.
[Mike Micone]
But the Anaconda Company did leave Butte for good in 1977, when they sold out to the multinational oil giant Atlantic Richfield Company, or ARCO. For a city that had known statewide dominance and prosperity for so long, the decline of Butte would turn out to be one that was both long and painful. Teresa Jordan here tries to understand how the midcentury decline really began.
[Mike Micone]
The open pit mine that former Butte Mayor Mike Micone is referring to is the Berkeley Pit, which consumed homes, businesses, churches and entire neighborhoods as it expanded, swallowing up whole portions of the city adjacent to the central business district, Uptown Butte. It was part of the Anaconda Company’s plan called the Greater Butte Project.
[Mike Micone]
So it didn’t make financial sense to tear down Uptown Butte and mine the hill upon which the city of Butte stands today. Nevertheless, times were tough when Mike Micone was in the mayor’s office, and arson fires did their part to help clear the way for Anaconda to mine the ground underneath the historic business district. As the buildings came down, local leaders began to seriously reconsider moving the city off of the hill to allow the Company to move in with the shovels and haul trucks.
[Mike Micone]
But before an idea called Butte Forward came to the forefront, which advocated for tearing down the remainder of the city on the Hill and moving out to the flatlands in the valley below, the federal dollars from Model Cities promised to help bring Butte back from the brink of economic decline. Butte wasn’t destined to be on the short list of cities who would receive those federal dollars, but as Mayor Micone tells it:
[Mike Micone]
For all the money coming into Butte from Model Cities, even the architects of the program in Butte have a hard time pointing to specific outcomes or lasting impacts the program had on the city, though that result was not unique to Butte. In a 1990 volume from the Policy Studies Organization, Robert Wood cites “the most sympathetic appraisal of Model Cities - and also the most authoritative - by Bernard Frieden and Marshall Kaplan, [which] concludes that a review of the program's administrative, organizational, fiscal, and strategic shortcomings compel one to go 'back to the drawing board' if one wishes to 'really help American cities’.”
[Mike Micone]
This is Life Underground, a history program about Butte, Montana that draws from oral histories in the collection at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives. I’m Clark Grant. Mike Micone was the last mayor of Butte, just before the city and county consolidated into one government in order to stave off further economic decline and deterioration of infrastructure. He was interviewed by oral historian and author Teresa Jordan in 1987, and that’s the tape we’ve been hearing so far in this episode. As far as city planning and redevelopment goes, things really start to get interesting in the 1970s in Butte, when the five and six story buildings in the central business district were burning left and right, and the Anaconda Company, at the time one of the largest corporations in the world, was continuing to buy up anything and everything in the way of its expanding open pit mine, the Berkeley. It was a time of uncertainty in Butte, and a radical new approach to redevelopment began to take hold in the minds of local business leaders and some in government, including Mayor Micone, known as Butte Forward.
[Mike Micone]
Despite their allies in the federal government, the Butte Forward group was beginning to see opposition from Butte people, many of whom had spent their childhoods in the historic district on the Hill and had memories and businesses in the old buildings. Beverly Hayes and other citizens established the Save the Central Business District organization and vehemently opposed the notion of tearing down the town. Eventually, the city council voted it down.
[Mike Micone]
We had the chance to interview Mayor Micone in January of 2020 for a new oral history on his time in governance in Butte. He was 88 at the time of the interview. Given everything that has happened since the 1970s, including the demise of the Anaconda Company, at the time on the world’s biggest corporations, the total closure of the Butte mines and eventually a bigger effort to revitalize the historic business district, Mike Micone reflected on the city’s deliberations about tearing it all down and mining the Butte hill.
[Mike Micone]
Both the destruction of neighborhoods for the expansion of the Berkeley Pit and the slow closure of the major industrial operations on the Butte hill resulted in a diminished tax base, which had serious implications for the city. Mayor Mike Micone handed off the Model Cities program to the next mayor of Butte, the man who would oversee the eventual consolidation of the city and county, an effort to stave off further deterioration of infrastructure which resulted from the ever-decreasing tax base. Don Peoples was Chief Executive of Butte-Silver Bow from 1979 to 1989, and he defends the Model Cities program. He was interviewed by Teresa Jordan for an oral history in 1987.
[Don Peoples]
[music - scene break]
Scene 2: From the Underground to the Open Pit
So Model Cities brought millions of federal dollars into Butte for revitalization and urban renewal in the late 1960s. But within a decade, there were serious considerations about moving the entire community off the hill and rebuilding a city center in the flatland of the valley below. So how did the question of tearing down the town to help the Anaconda Copper Mining Company even come about? 1955 saw the beginning of the end of underground mining in Butte, and a transition to open pit mining. Requiring much less physical labor and a leaner workforce, the open pit operations appealed to the Anaconda Company because of the potential cost savings. It required mining many more times the amount of dirt, yielding a fraction of the desired ore, but it promised to be the technological transformation that could keep the mining city going. Unfortunately for those living on the east side of town, it also meant their homes would be destroyed, their neighborhoods erased, and their communities dispersed. For miners working underground on the hill, it meant a whole new way of doing business, and for many, it meant the end of their mining career.
For a better idea about how the underground mines differed from the highly mechanized mining of the open pit, and the effect the transition to the open pit had on the town of Butte, we turn to a Teresa Jordan interview with Louis Forsell, recorded in 1986.
[Louis Forsell]
Teresa Jordan interviewed dozens of Butte miners in the mid 1980s. Next, we hear a clip from a session she did with Dan Aguilar shortly after he had been forced into retirement once the mines had closed in Butte. Here, Dan helps us better understand the culture of underground hard rock mining in Butte, and just how different it was from the open pit mining that came later.
[Dan Aguilar]
Scene 3: The Destruction of the Ethnic Neighborhoods
This is Life Underground, a production from KBMF and the Butte-Silver Bow Archives. The implementation of the Berkeley Pit on the east side of Butte in the mid twentieth century didn’t just change mining in the mining city; it also displaced entire neighborhoods and ethnic communities. The Anaconda Company bought and then tore down thousands of houses and hundreds of commercial buildings, including grocery stores, churches, community centers, bars and restaurants. Today, a mile-wide gaping hole occupies the site of these unique communities, many of which were organized, albeit informally, by the nationality of the countless immigrants who streamed into Butte to find work in the early 20th century. Finns, Irish, Italians, Serbs, Mexicans and others made their homes on the East Side in communities like Meaderville, East Butte, Finntown, and McQueen. Jim Michelotti grew up in McQueen, and he was interviewed by Brian James Leech, author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit.
[Jim Michelotti]
The process of displacing an entire neighborhood, tearing down churches, stores and homes, might seem unconscionable, or at the very least something that would be met with opposition. But throughout the course of this oral history project, time and time again we heard that no effective opposition to the open pit mining at the Berkeley was ever organized. The community of Butte, so reliant on the Anaconda company for employment and a tax base, couldn’t say no. In fact, the Company had the process of acquiring land down to a science, and had the money to buy everyone out. In our oral history with Jim Moyle, he describes Anaconda’s strategy.
[Jim Moyle]
That was Jim Moyle, speaking about the Anaconda Company’s tactics for displacing neighborhoods as they expanded their open pit mine. And that brings us to the end of episode 5 of Life Underground, which we called Get Off the Hill. Join us next time for an episode entitled One Long Road, where we take an in-depth look at Meaderville, the predominantly Italian community on the east edge of Butte that was swallowed up by the Berkeley Pit. I’m Clark Grant, and this is Life Underground.
[credits]