The Columbia Gardens:

Butte’s Park of Copper, Community, and Contested Memory

Origins: A Mine Claim Becomes a Recreation Ground

The land that would eventually hold the Columbia Gardens had its first recorded recreational use not as a gift to workers but as a modest commercial enterprise pursued by a man who could not make it pay as a mine. In 1876, William Adams filed a claim in the Horse Canyon section of East Butte, naming the site the Columbia. When the ground yielded no profitable ore, Adams pivoted, constructing a beer hall that offered horse racing, gambling, and rudimentary diversions. The site changed hands in 1888, when John Gordon and Frederick Ritchie leased the property and attempted to formalize it as a pleasure ground. Their effort, hampered by inadequate streetcar service to the remote location, attracted few visitors and returned little revenue. The first Columbia Gardens, such as it was, died of inconvenience before it could establish any lasting identity (Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, “The Columbia Gardens Amusements”).

The story of the Columbia Gardens that Butte residents would remember for generations began only when a far wealthier man with far larger ambitions intervened. In March 1899, William Andrews Clark, one of the three so-called Copper Kings who dominated Butte’s industrial and political life, purchased the Adams property. Clark’s motives were mixed and have been debated by historians ever since. He was then at the center of a national bribery scandal surrounding his election to the United States Senate in 1898, a proceeding that ultimately resulted in his expulsion before he could be seated. As scholar Gwendolyn Lockman has noted, the acquisition of Columbia Gardens offered Clark not only a useful distraction from the scandal but a means of rehabilitating his public image in a city that had watched his maneuvering with skepticism (Lockman). Clark instructed Jesse R. Wharton, manager of his Butte Electric Railway Company, to identify a new, better-situated site near existing trolley routes. Wharton selected the east end of St. Ann Street, and Clark purchased the first twenty-one acres there. After demolishing the old Adams buildings and constructing a new complex, the park opened to the public on June 4, 1899.

The Park at Its Height: Grounds, Rides, and Public Life

What Clark built bore no resemblance to the beer hall enterprise it replaced. The Columbia Gardens quickly grew into a substantial public amenity, eventually expanding to sixty-eight acres by 1925. The grounds were deliberately designed to offer a contrast to the scarred, largely treeless cityscape of Butte, where open-cut mining and sulfurous smelter smoke had stripped the surrounding hills of vegetation. Inside the Gardens, visitors found manicured lawns, shaded walkways, and elaborate floral arrangements grown in the park’s own greenhouse. Gardeners shaped blooms into decorative figures, including a large butterfly and, after the Anaconda Company assumed ownership, a rendering of that company’s arrowhead logo. A greenhouse and herbarium offered specimens of Montana plant life rarely encountered in the mining district itself (Kearney 14-22).

For recreation, Clark installed a boat chute as the park’s first ride, sending passengers down a slide in flat-bottomed boats to splash into a small artificial lake. The lake itself allowed swimming and canoeing. A wooden roller coaster, known as the Figure 8 for its shape, was added in 1906, constructed under the supervision of carpenter Michael Walsh and commissioned by park manager Jessie Wharton (Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, “The Columbia Gardens Amusements”). The coaster was a three-level structure before a 1917 accident led to its reduction to two levels and a subsequent redesign by the Anaconda Company in 1929. A carousel designed by the Allan Herschell Company of North Tonawanda, New York, was installed in 1928, and a biplane ride was added in the late 1920s. The grounds also contained a three-story pavilion with a dance floor of approximately fifteen thousand square feet, which became a central venue for school proms, community dances, and performances by Big Band-era musicians who passed through Montana’s mining cities (Montana Standard, “Columbia Gardens: Butte’s Lost Amusement Park”).

The park’s zoo housed Montana wildlife in named enclosures, with animals including wolves, bears, bison, mountain lions, lynx, porcupines, and badgers available for viewing at no charge. A baseball field served the Butte Miners, a minor league team whose games drew large crowds. Throughout its history, the park also hosted Miners Union Day, observed each June 13, which drew thousands from across the Butte mining community to picnic, attend athletic competitions, and celebrate labor solidarity on grounds that had been created by the copper industry itself (Montana Historical Society, “Columbia Gardens: William A. Clark’s Happy Legacy”).

Admission to the park was never charged. Clark, who controlled the Butte Electric Railway, extended the streetcar line to the Gardens and established what became known as Children’s Day, a weekly Thursday during summer months when young people under sixteen rode to the park free of charge and enjoyed reduced prices on rides. That policy was maintained for the park’s entire seventy-four years of operation, with buses replacing the trolleys in the late 1930s, and the final Children’s Day falling on August 30, 1973 (Carl 12-15).

Clark’s most frequently quoted statement about the park came from a conversation recorded by journalist C. B. Glasscock: “The Columbia Gardens is my monument. Of my many business enterprises it is the one I love best, and it is practically the only one on which I lose money” (Glasscock, cited in Montana Historical Society, “Columbia Gardens: William A. Clark’s Happy Legacy”). Whatever the sincerity of that sentiment, Clark’s willingness to absorb annual operating losses for the sake of public goodwill produced a facility that outlived him and took on institutional significance neither he nor his contemporaries could have anticipated.

A Corporate Stewardship: Anaconda and Welfare Capitalism

Clark died in 1925 at the age of eighty-six. His estate, then valued at more than two hundred million dollars, was liquidated over subsequent years, and the Anaconda Copper Mining Company acquired his Montana holdings, including the Butte Electric Railway and the Columbia Gardens, in 1928. The transition placed an avowedly profit-driven corporation in charge of a park that had never been designed to make money, and the question of whether Anaconda would continue operating it at all was genuinely open.

University of Montana historian Matthew Carl, in a thesis examining this period, has argued that the Anaconda Company’s decision to keep the park operating was driven not by sentiment but by a calculated program of welfare capitalism, the practice by which large industrial employers provide social amenities to workers with the intent of building loyalty and discouraging labor militancy. The park ran at a reported annual cost of approximately fifty thousand dollars, a figure the company absorbed because the Columbia Gardens made Butte a more attractive place to recruit and retain skilled miners, and because it projected an image of corporate benevolence at a time when labor-management tension in Butte was severe (Carl 27-40). The company invested further in the park’s infrastructure, adding the carousel, redesigning the roller coaster, and eventually building a new pavilion after the original burned in October 1907 along with the outdoor bandstand.

The Anaconda Company’s stewardship was not, however, simply philanthropic management at arm’s length. The park regularly hosted Miner’s Field Day, a company-sponsored event distinct from the union-organized Miners Union Day, at which Anaconda staged athletic competitions, picnics, and entertainments for its workforce. These events, as Carl observes, were explicitly designed to position the company as the source of workers’ leisure and community well-being, fostering an identification between the interests of the corporation and the interests of Butte families (Carl 45-52). The Columbia Gardens thus served a dual function across its Anaconda years: as a genuine public amenity appreciated by residents on its own terms, and as an instrument of labor management deployed by a company with extensive financial and political interests in shaping Butte’s social landscape.

The park was not immune to the political tensions it was partly meant to ease. In July 1917, during the Butte copper strike that followed the catastrophic Speculator Mine fire, the Industrial Workers of the World organizer Frank Little spoke to an estimated six thousand people at the Columbia Gardens baseball stadium. His address condemned the war and the copper companies with equal force, generating national press attention and drawing accusations of sedition from newspapers across Montana, many of which were then controlled by or closely aligned with the Anaconda Company itself (Story of Butte, “View of Columbia Gardens Location”). Little was lynched by unknown assailants three weeks later. The fact that Little chose the Gardens as his platform, a site created and maintained by the copper industry, was not incidental; the park was the largest assembly ground available to Butte’s working population.

The Depression years and the World War II era tested Anaconda’s commitment to the park but did not end it. The lake was drained and converted to a parking lot in 1937, as automobile use increased and attendance patterns shifted. The zoo was eventually reduced and then removed. But the core attractions, the pavilion, the carousel, the roller coaster, the floral grounds, and the Children’s Day tradition, persisted through economic downturns and wartime rationing, sustaining the park’s role as a fixed point in community life across multiple generations of Butte families.

Closure and Fire: The End of the Gardens

The structural threat to the Columbia Gardens came not from economic mismanagement but from geology. The Berkeley Pit, an open-cut copper mine that Anaconda had opened in 1954, steadily consumed the east side of Butte. Entire neighborhoods, including Meaderville and McQueen, were demolished to accommodate the expanding excavation. By the late 1960s, the pit’s northern edge was approaching the Columbia Gardens property. Attendance at the park had also begun to decline as Butte’s population contracted along with employment in the underground mines (Montana Standard, “Columbia Gardens: Butte’s Lost Amusement Park”).

When Anaconda’s copper operations in Chile were nationalized by the government of Salvador Allende in 1971, the company lost a significant portion of its revenue base. The financial pressure converged with the spatial one. In January 1973, Anaconda announced that the upcoming season would be the last for the Columbia Gardens. The park operated through its final summer, and on Labor Day 1973, it closed. After seven decades of Thursdays when children rode streetcars and buses to the mountains east of town at no charge, the program ended (Carl 78-82).

Following closure, the park’s equipment was stored in the arcade building while community members attempted to organize a plan for relocating the rides to a new site elsewhere in Silver Bow County. Those efforts never reached completion. On November 12, 1973, the arcade building caught fire. The official investigation attributed the cause to an overloaded electrical transformer, a finding that struck many Butte residents as implausible given that power to the site had been shut off approximately two months before the blaze (Lockman). The carousel horses, stored inside, were destroyed. The fire ended any practical possibility of preserving or relocating the park’s most valued equipment. The Continental Pit was subsequently excavated on the former park site, adding a second major open-cut mine to the terrain that had once held the only major amusement park in Montana.

Afterlife and Memory

The Columbia Gardens did not disappear entirely from the material landscape of Butte, though its physical remnants are scattered and partial. The tandem swings that children had tried to swing to their maximum arc, the so-called crack the bar tradition, were salvaged and relocated to Clark Park in Butte. The arch that once marked the entrance to the Grand Pavilion was moved to private property at the old Beef Trail ski area. A velvet-upholstered roller coaster car was restored and placed on display.

The most concerted effort to honor the park’s memory took shape in 1996, when community members established the Spirit of Columbia Gardens Carousel, a nonprofit organization devoted to recreating the carousel destroyed in the 1973 fire. The project required nearly two decades of volunteer labor; each of the thirty-two hand-carved horses in the finished carousel represented approximately one thousand hours of work. The carousel opened in Stodden Park on July 27, 2018 (Grace, Richard P., Butte Oral History Project). It serves as the most visible acknowledgment of what the park represented to multiple generations of the city’s residents.

In 1994, Butte broadcaster and historian Pat Kearney published Butte’s Pride: The Columbia Gardens, a volume that drew on photographs from the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives and accounts from residents who had worked or spent their childhoods in the park. The book, published by Skyhigh Communications of Butte, remains the most comprehensive popular account of the Gardens (Kearney). A 1999 Montana PBS documentary, Remembering the Columbia Gardens, extended that work through filmed interviews with Kearney and former visitors and employees.

The Columbia Gardens occupies a layered position in Butte’s historical memory. At one level it was a functioning public park that provided genuine leisure to a working-class population in a city with few comparable amenities. At another it was an instrument of corporate strategy, maintained across decades because it served the Anaconda Company’s interest in maintaining a compliant and settled workforce. Its destruction, whether accomplished by deliberate arson or by the indifferent spread of open-pit mining, has become part of a broader narrative Butte residents tell about the relationship between capital and community in the industrial West. The land the Gardens occupied is now a pit. The carousel turns again in Stodden Park.

Works Cited

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. “The Columbia Gardens.” Archives Blog, 2019, buttearchives.org/columbia-gardens/. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives. “The Columbia Gardens Amusements.” Archives Blog, 30 Sept. 2019, buttearchives.wordpress.com/2019/09/30/the-columbia-gardens-amusements/. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Carl, Matthew R. “The Columbia Gardens Amusement Park: Company Sponsored Community in Butte, Montana.” Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, and Professional Papers, University of Montana, 2011. ScholarWorks at University of Montana, scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/971/. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Glasscock, C. B. War of the Copper Kings. Grosset and Dunlap, 1935. Quoted in Montana Historical Society, “Columbia Gardens: William A. Clark’s Happy Legacy,” mths.mt.gov/education/StoriesOfTheLand/Part2/Chapter10/Ch10Educators/ColumbiaGardens. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Grace, Richard P. “Richard Grace Interview, March 15, 1980.” Butte Oral History Project, OH 098, Archives and Special Collections, Mansfield Library, University of Montana-Missoula. ScholarWorks at University of Montana, scholarworks.umt.edu/butte_oralhistory/25/. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Kearney, Pat. Butte’s Pride: The Columbia Gardens. Skyhigh Communications, 1994.

Lockman, Gwendolyn. “Recreation and Reclamation of the ‘Richest Hill on Earth.’” The Metropole: The Blog of the Urban History Association, 31 Jan. 2022, themetropole.blog/2022/01/31/recreation-and-reclamation-of-the-richest-hill-on-earth/. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Mitchell, Edward H., publisher. Columbia Gardens, Butte, Montana. 1910-1920. Montana History Portal, Montana Vintage Postcards Collection, Billings Public Library, www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/78377. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Montana Historical Society. “Columbia Gardens: William A. Clark’s Happy Legacy.” Stories of the Land, mths.mt.gov/education/StoriesOfTheLand/Part2/Chapter10/Ch10Educators/ColumbiaGardens. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Montana Standard. “Columbia Gardens: Butte’s Lost Amusement Park.” 6 Oct. 2016, mtstandard.com/news/state-and-regional/montana/columbia-gardens-butte-s-lost-amusement-park/collection_a4b37cae-a30a-5806-a427-cebac2569a28.html. Accessed 1 May 2026.

Murphy, Mary. Mining Cultures: Men, Women, and Leisure in Butte, 1914-41. University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Story of Butte. “View of Columbia Gardens Location: Site of Frank Little’s Most Famous Speech.” storyofbutte.org/items/show/3415. Accessed 1 May 2026.