Episodes 001-050

Episodes 151-200

Episodes 201-250

Episodes 251-300

Episode 151 - A Christmas Tragedy

Tom O’Neill and James Mooney responded to the police call. When they arrived at the Merriam Block, they found Mrs. Benevue shot and Knight gone to his room at the rear of the building. O’Neill, Mooney, Walsh, and Kinney charged his room, to be met with gunshots.

Episode 152 - MOP Smelter

Augustus Heinze started his career in Butte in 1889 as a 20-year-old mining engineer for the Boston & Montana Company. Four years later, in 1893, Heinze and his brothers had incorporated the Montana Ore Purchasing (MOP) Company, to provide milling and smelting services to anyone who would pay.

Episode 153 - A Walkerville Party

A friend of mine shared an invitation to the AOUW’s third anniversary party in Walkerville, two days before Christmas, 1885. The grand ball was held on a Wednesday evening and actually honored the establishment of the Silver Bow Lodge Number 11 of the AOUW.

Episode 154 - Anti-Spitting Law

One of the hot topics before the Butte city commission in the summer of 1901 was the anti-expectoration ordinance. No-spitting laws had been proposed for many years but never enacted, in part because of the belief that prejudice on the part of policemen would be a problem.

Episode 157 - Booker T. Washington

Washington came to Butte on March 6, 1913. He arrived as the white supremacist governor of South Carolina, Coleman Blease, was announcing that Negroes in that state would not be tried for alleged assaults on white women (conviction would be automatic), nor would those who lynched them be punished.

Episode 158 - Election of 1896

The presidential election of 1896 was among the most hard-fought and complex in U.S. history, and Butte had a vested interest in it. The issue that mattered was gold vs. silver.

Episode 159 - Sacred Heart Church

The first mass, Christmas Day 1903, opened the completed church at 448 East Park Street, on the south side of the street almost directly across from the Wright’s Drug Store that is the only surviving historic building in this section of the block.

Episode 160 - Myron Brinig

Jewish, gay, and of Romanian ancestry, author Myron Brinig was born in Minneapolis in 1896 but spent his childhood in Butte, from 1897-1914. The Brinigs lived at 814 West Granite, a little blue miner’s cottage that survives today.

Episode 161 - The Butte Hotel

The four-story Butte Hotel at 23-31 East Broadway (where a parking structure stands today) was erected in 1892-93, opening in August 1893. It contained 120 rooms, expensive at $3 to $5 per night when $1 a night was more typical.

Episode 162 - Greeley School

Greeley School was built along with many others in Butte as a response to the exploding population in the late 1890s. First through eighth grades were taught at Greeley in its early years. The staffs at Greeley in 1905 and 1910 reveal a diversity of origins, and residences scattered all over town.

Episode 163 - East Park Street in 1894

Signage in old photos are a great resource for history in Butte, and a photo of East Park Street from 1894 provides a wealth of information. I’ll try to paint you a word picture based on that photo, looking west from near Wyoming Street.

Episode 164 - McDermott/Finlen Hotel

Wealthy mining pioneer Miles Finlen purchased and renamed the McDermott about 1895. Finlen was born in Ireland in 1845 and came to America in the wake of the Irish potato famine in 1847.

Episode 165 - The Florence Hotel

The great-grandmother of all the boardinghouses was the Florence Hotel. Built in 1898 at the behest of and with financing by Amalgamated (Anaconda) Company officers, it replaced the Hale House, which burned down on March 21, 1898.

Episode 166 - Opera House Saga

Butte residents were shocked to read the announcement in late September 1896 that the Maguire Opera House was to be torn down. The 1,100-seat theater, the prime venue for entertainment in Butte, was only seven years old, a new building at 50 West Broadway that replaced the original opera house that burned in 1888.

Episode 167 - Shabbishacks

In May 1928, the Butte Miner headlined “City Cleanup Stirs Demand for Removal of Eyesores—97 Buildings Condemned as Fire Hazards.” This was the start of the Shabbishacks campaign, probably Butte’s first concerted effort to remove urban blight.

Episode 168 - Dance Marathon

Over 15 hours on December 7 and 8, 1909, at least 70 couples had dwindled to three when Mayor Nevin, County Attorney Walker, Sheriff O’Rourke, and Police Chief Quinn all stopped the dance, citing “grave effects” and physical harm that would ensue if it continued.

Episode 169 - Mayflower Mine

We know, of course, that W.A. Clark had his fingers in many mineral pies beyond Butte, in Arizona and Nevada among others. But he was also involved in mining outside the Butte District, and not too far away, as indicated by an 1898 letter to him (in New York) from the Superintendent of the Mayflower Mine south of Whitehall.

Episode 170 - Iona Cafe

In 1914, the first building permit was issued for the building at 16 S. Main that would become the Iona Café. It began as a one-story building, but the second floor was added before 1916; the original building cost $4,000.

Episode 171 - Death By Lion

The gruesome news spread quickly around the world. Even the Taranaki (New Zealand) Herald carried the report of the lion that attacked trainer Walter Blanchard, better known as Zeke Walters, during the Lehman Brothers Circus parade in Butte Saturday October 1, 1898.

Episode 172 - BSB Consolidation

Everyone in Butte knows we have a unified city-county government, established when the two jurisdictions combined in 1977. But that wasn’t the first time a merger was attempted.

Episode 173 - Henry Brundy

Henry Brundy, born in Missouri in 1823 to German immigrants, became one of the Forty-Niners in the California gold rush. He found enough gold to return to St. Louis where he built a $140,000 hotel, but gold fever brought him first to Pikes Peak in 1860 and then to Montana in 1862.

Episode 174 - Bogk’s Gardens

Before Columbia Gardens, before the Basin Creek park, there was Bogk’s. Gustavus Bogk’s City Park, also known as Bogk’s Gardens and later as Meaderville Gardens, was established about 1879 in the upper reaches of Silver Bow Creek

Episode 175 - The WCTU

Butte may seem an unlikely place for the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, anti-alcohol in a town with hundreds of saloons. But the Montana chapter of the WCTU was organized in Butte in 1883.

Episode 176 - Silver King Lode

In 2012 a hole opened up in the street maybe 40 feet from the northwest corner of my garage. After numerous people came to look into it and paint variously colored marks on the pavement, a Butte-Silver Bow Public Works Department crew arrived to excavate the hole.

Episode 177 - Train Wreck of 1908

Just before midnight on Friday, May 1, 1908, the eastbound Burlington #6 train exploded and partially derailed about two miles west of the Northern Pacific depot on Front Street, a bit west of Williamsburg, on the south side of Silver Bow Creek across from the Tivoli Brewery.

Episode 178 - Bicycle Racing

In the 1890s, one of the many sports rages was bicycle racing. The first dirt tracks were unsatisfactory for both competitors and viewers, and in 1887 the first wooden board “saucer” was constructed in Omaha.

Episode 179 - The Bell Smelter

Between 1880 and 1886, at least seven processing plants operated in Butte, including concentrators and smelters. One of the earlier smelters was the Bell.

Episode 180 - The Dexter Mill

On January 1, 1875, William Farlin famously filed a new claim on the Asteroid lode, based on assayed ore that showed rich silver values. He renamed the claim and his mine the Travona, touching off the rejuvenation of the nearly busted mining camp.

Episode 181 - Longfellow School

All told, the Butte School District constructed 14 schools or major additions between 1916 and 1921. On the flats, school district architect Wellington Smith designed three almost identical schools in the collegiate-gothic style: Madison, Hawthorne, and Longfellow.

Episode 182 - Panic of 1907

The Panic of 1907 effectively ended when financiers J.P. Morgan and John D. Rockefeller backed failing banks and prevented the city of New York from going bankrupt. Also in response to the panic, a new national organization was established in 1913 with rules and protections to prevent similar bank crises.

Episode 183 - Betty’s Nightmare

Sometimes discoveries in Butte take us well beyond the local story. In 2011 when Chuck Schnabel was renovating the Grand Hotel on Broadway Street to relocate Quarry Brewing there, he found a movie poster inside the wall for “Betty’s Nightmare.”

Episode 184 - Pipestone Hot Springs

Butte’s people found relaxation in diverse ways, but two hot springs, Gregson (Fairmont) to the west and Pipestone, 33 miles to the southeast, were among the most popular destinations.

Episode 185 - Butte Reduction Works

The Butte Reduction Works was built in 1883 as a custom smelter processing ore for the Lewisohn Brothers’ Butte & Boston and Boston & Montana companies and others, but it failed and was purchased in 1885 by employees of the Parrott Smelter.

Episode 186 - Milwaukee Road Grading

In 1905, the board of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, the “Milwaukee Road,” approved a $45-million extension of their track into the Pacific Northwest. At a cost equivalent of more than $1.3 billion today, it would in many places run parallel with the track of their competitor, the Northern Pacific.

Episode 187 - Synagogue

The first Jewish organization in Butte, the Hebrew Benevolent Association, began in 1878 (some sources say 1881), a year before Butte City was incorporated and elected Henry Jacobs, a Jewish immigrant from Germany, its first mayor.

Episode 188 - Bakeries

Butte’s earliest documented baker was Gustavus Bogk, a German immigrant (born 1826) by way of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, where he operated a bakery for several years before moving to Deer Lodge (1870) and Butte (1877).

Episode 189 - Butte & Zenith City

With a name like Butte & Zenith City Mining Company, you might expect it to be related to some lost mining town called Zenith City somewhere near Butte, but you’d be wrong. The Zenith City in this connection is nearly 1,100 miles from Butte. It’s Duluth, Minnesota.

Episode 190 - Shortridge Church

The Shortridge Christian Church was built in 1893. The land at the corner of Washington and Mercury Streets cost $3,065 in 1891, an “inflated” price, according to financially strapped church elders, and the structure itself cost $10,000 plus $2,000 more for the furnishings.

Episode 191 - Montana Copper Co.

“Montana Copper Company” has a nice, simple ring to it. But it was based in New York, owned by the immigrant Jewish German Lewisohn Brothers, and it forms the corporate basis for some of Butte’s and Montana’s most important industrial developments.

Episode 192 - A.P.A. Riot

The American Protective Association, the A.P.A., was anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, and anti-union. Butte may seem like a strange place for such sentiments to take hold, but they did, briefly, in the 1890s.

Episode 193 - Welch Quarry

James Welch established a granite quarry on the east side of the Continental Divide in 1899 to supply building stone to Butte and beyond.

Episode 194 - Camp Caroline

Caroline’s house in Lion Gulch west of Goldflint Mountain was expanded into a boarding house and dance hall, and about 1890 Lowery sold it to the Flagg family. The new owners and various of their 10 children managed the Camp Caroline house for decades.

Episode 195 - Ramsay

Although Anaconda has some elements of a company town, the ultimate company town in southwest Montana has to be Ramsay. The town was built in 1916-17 by the DuPont chemical company to house officials and workers for their new dynamite manufacturing plant about a half mile to the north (across the interstate from Ramsay today).

Episode 196 - Placer Mines

With the advent of underground mining for silver beginning in 1875, we tend to think of Butte’s mining story as beneath the surface. But placer mining continued for decades.

Episode 197 - Chin Chun Hock

When Chin Chun Hock visited Butte in October 1898, the Butte Miner headlined its report “The King of the Chinamen Will Construct a Building.” While he wasn’t actually king of anything, Hock, whose name is sometimes given as Chun Ching Hock, was certainly the most prominent Chinese businessman in Seattle.

Episode 198 - Edgar Paxson

Edgar S. Paxson was born in 1852 near Buffalo, New York, and spent his teen years there working in his father’s carriage-making business. He also got his start as an artist painting signs.

Episode 199 - Hogan’s Army

William Hogan was a teamster at the Moulton Mine in Walkerville, where he boarded at the American House on the north side of Daly between A and B Streets. At least, that was his job until the silver crisis of 1893 threw many employees at the Moulton out of work.

Episode 200 - Playgrounds

Although land was always at a premium in industrial, booming Butte, whether for mine activities or businesses and homes, as early as 1906 Butte had two public playgrounds.