Butte

Long known as the "Richest Hill on Earth," Butte produced more mineral wealth than any other mine district in the world up to the middle of the 20th century, with over $43 billion unearthed to date. At the height of the Industrial Revolution, the mining hill became the most concentrated area of industrial machines on earth and generated an influential labor market, an ethnically diverse population, the largest red-light district in the American West, nine railroads, and the largest network of underground workings per square mile in the world, with over 10,000 miles of tunneling, while drawing a fierce struggle for riches between entrepreneurs and laborers. More than a century of mining also left exposed toxic mine waste and polluted water, making Butte, at the headwaters of the Columbia River in the most biologically diverse area of North America, the site of the nation's largest environmental cleanup. The Old Lexington Stamp Mill, Butte's first stamp mill, was erected on this site by Charles Hendrie in 1867 as a five-stamp ore crushing mill, later taken over by A.J. Davis, left idle for nine years, enlarged after a new extraction process was discovered, and operating around the clock after January 23, 1877; Davis sold it with the Lexington Mine to a French syndicate in 1881 for $1 million, the largest transaction in Butte up to that time, and the mill eventually processed about $45 million of wealth in today's money. Andrew Jackson Davis, born in 1820 and dead in 1890, left home at 13, traded goods profitably as a teenager, established the first set of chain stores in America at 29, came through Montana Territory in 1863, entered Butte City in 1864, persisted through bleak years because he believed the exposed ore veins would someday be profitably mined, recorded the Baltic Claim for a patent application in 1878, and became the first to realize spectacular wealth from Butte's minerals before moving into banking and cattle. Butte's first high school was erected in 1886 on the parking lot behind this site and was among the nation's most advanced school buildings, but underground mining caused it to subside and crack until it was condemned at the end of the 1913 school year; while a new building rose, the class of 1914 met in newly built city jails behind the Butte-Silver Bow Courthouse, and the replacement completed in 1915 had Montana's largest and strongest reinforced foundation at the time, later serving as Butte's first junior high school in the 1890's and as a grade school in 1957 before closing in 1976.

Butte-Silver Bow (balance), Montana · United States