A Day in Butte, MT

Our first stop in Butte was the Berkley Pit.  Open pit copper mining on "The Richest Hill on Earth" started in 1955.  Click on each of the following photos to learn about the pit. 

Remember that the pit is 1 mile wide from north to south (what you are looking at) , 1.25 mile wide from east to west and over 1,000 feet deep.  You can see the water treatment plant on the opposite shore.



Our next stop was the Mai Wah Museum.  http://maiwah.org/  The two buildings that contain the museum were right in the middle of Butte's Chinatown.   Most Chinese came to the US due to civil strife in China and the opportunity for employment in the gold fields.

The second floor of the Mai Wah building was a noodle parlor and this was the kitchen.  The floor is concrete which surprised me because it is on the second floor.  The three wok stove was heated by wood but was adapted to gas a few years after it was built.

The museum is just getting started so some of the displays were not marked.  I believe these are soapstone carvings.

They were very intricate.

The Wah Chong Tai Company contained a Chinese store. The mercantile operated from a large room on the first floor, stocking items imported from China to sell to Asians and to others. Merchandise included fine Chinese and Japanese porcelain, bulk containers of dried herbs and tonics, and string-tied packages of Chinese-style clothing

This Chinese woman's dress was intricately embroidered silk.  The museum contains lots of information on what life was like for the Chinese immigrants.

Our next stop was the Copper King Mansion.   This was built by William Andrews Clark from 1884 to 1888.  It was inherited by Clark's son when he died in 1925.  Eventually it was sold to different groups including a convent.   The Cote family has now owned it for four generations.  It is open for tour but also ran as a bed and breakfast. 

Construction of the home costs over $250,000 and that cost doesn't include the addition.

The beer stein collection belonged to Mr. Clark but the home contains lot of antiques purchased or acquired by the Cote family.

There are nine different kind of wood used in the construction of the home.   All the ceilings are decorated with hand-painted frescos.  The wall in the entryway and most of the original home's walls are plaster and paint mixed then spread in a design that looked like flowing water when the glow of the gas lights hit them.

Even though it didn't contain any furniture when the Cote family bought it, this room was immediately identified as the billiards room due to the ball and cue frescos on the ceiling, the ball and cue carvings around the fireplace and the cue stands around a mirror on one wall.

This stove is one of the first electric model stoves ever built.

Some of the curtains were original as were most of the chandeliers. 

Even the lowly hinge on the entry doors were works of art.

The Staircase of Nations switch-backed to the second floor.  It was so named because the panels were all different and represented flowers and birds from different nations.

This room was in the addition that was built 25 years after the main mansion.  Due to the change of fashion during the intervening years, this room did not have ceiling frescos or the plaster and paint walls.

The transoms over all the doors on the original building were decorated.  The addition had plain glass.

The entry doors and transoms were beautiful stained glass.

Work was being done on some of the exterior of the building.  The window at the end of this patio is actually a walk-out window.  It could be raised for access to the patio.

Our last stop was the campus of Montana Tech to see the Mineral Museum.  There's not much parking on this hillside campus.  This is the view of the old section of town.

I don't know if you can read any of the information on this geode but it was huge.  At least two foot high.