Butte

The panel lets the pit swallow the Columbia Gardens in a single verb; the end came in three steps. W. A. Clark opened the park east of town on June 4, 1899, with free admission and free streetcar rides for children on Thursdays. The Anaconda Company bought it with the rest of his Butte holdings in 1928 and closed it after Labor Day, September 3, 1973. On November 12 the arcade burned with the carousel horses inside. The official cause was electrical, and many in Butte believed otherwise. The Continental Pit, not the Berkeley, took the ground.

What the plaque says

Butte Butte owes its existence to placer gold discovered on Silver Bow Creek in 1864. But the gold soon played out and it was demand for Butte's copper that made it "the richest hill on Earth." The hill produced over two billion dollars worth of gold, silver, copper and zinc. Drifts, winzes and stopes honeycombed the underground, creating a labyrinth that still extends beneath the city. There were over 3,000 miles of workings, and shafts, some reaching a depth of 4,000 feet. In 1955, the Anaconda Company opened the Berkley Pit to mine low-grade metals. The pit swallowed up Meaderville, McQueen, and copper king W.A. Clark's famed Columbia Gardens amusement park. Butte has a cosmopolitan population derived from the four corners of the world. She was a bold, unashamed rootin', tootin', hell-roarin' camp in days gone by and still drinks her liquor straight. At the heart of American unionism with a labor history second to none in the nation, the National Park Service recognized Butte as a National Historic Landmark (NHL) in 1961. In 2006, the Park Service extended the landmark to recognize Butte, Walkerville, and Anaconda as a labor corridor whose intertwined histories encompass nearly 10,000 acres. It is the largest NHL in the West.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Mai Wah Museum — 3.2 mi
  Two brick buildings left from Butte's Chinatown, and a store whose goods came home after seventy years away.
• Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine Memorial — 3.4 mi
  An overlook above the shaft where the 1917 fire began, and the letters some of the trapped men wrote while they waited.

More markers nearby

• The Boulder Batholith and the Richest Hill on Earth — steps away
• Meaderville — steps away
• The Great Divide Trophy — 9.3 mi
• Keep Watching The Skies! — 15 mi