The Alta Mine, which gave birth to the town of Wickes, was discovered in 1869 by a prospector named Williams and his party, working the silver-bearing veins in the mountains about thirty miles south of Helena. The Colorado Mining District, as the area was known, had been organized in 1864, and the Gregory Mine had been producing since 1867, so the ground was not entirely unknown. But the Alta was richer than what had come before, and its discovery set in motion the sequence of investment and development that would eventually produce one of the largest silver smelting operations in Montana Territory.

The original claim holders worked the Alta sporadically through the early 1870s, lacking the capital to develop it at scale. In 1876, they sold their interests to a group of New York investors led by William W. Wickes, a Brooklyn businessman and prominent stockholder who organized the Montana Company and platted a townsite the following year, naming it after himself. It was the kind of naming that was common in the West, where the man with the money often got to put his name on the map, and in this case the name stuck.

The early community that grew up around the mine was modest and, by the standards of the era, unusually attentive to its moral character. William W. Wickes and his nephew, the Reverend Thomas A. Wickes, organized a Presbyterian church on July 13, 1880, drawing together Christians from Methodist, Congregational, Lutheran, and other backgrounds in a non-sectarian gathering that voted unanimously to affiliate as Presbyterian in tribute to the elder Wickes's leadership. Wickes had also established a Sabbath reading room for the miners, a gesture toward the idea that the men who worked the mine were owed something beyond wages. The church's formation predated many of the secular amenities that would follow, and it gave the camp a social center that was not a saloon, which was unusual.

Development accelerated in 1879 when Samuel T. Hauser reorganized the company as the Alta Montana Company, capitalized at five million dollars, and began expanding the underground workings. By 1880, the population had reached about four hundred. A fire destroyed the Alta mill in 1882, but rather than abandoning the operation, Hauser acquired the company in 1883 and reorganized it yet again as the Helena Mining and Reduction Company. The new company constructed a smelter in 1884 and secured a branch line of the Northern Pacific Railroad from Helena, and the combination of improved processing capacity and rail access fueled a boom that lasted until 1893. At its peak, the population of Wickes reached roughly fifteen hundred people, and the town had two general merchandise stores, two meat markets, a drug store, livery stables, blacksmith shops, two hotels, a restaurant, nine saloons, and five dance halls.

The Helena Mining and Reduction Company's smelter at Wickes became the largest silver reduction works in Montana, capable of processing up to two hundred tons of ore daily. It drew feedstock not only from local mines but from distant operations in Idaho's Coeur d'Alene district, and it employed reverberatory furnaces fueled by charcoal from six nearby kilns producing twenty-five thousand bushels per month. The Alta Mine alone yielded approximately one and a quarter million tons of ore before 1893, generating about thirty-two million dollars in value, primarily from silver and lead. The total production of the Wickes district before 1900 exceeded fifty million dollars.

The smelter at Wickes was not just a local facility; it was a regional processing center, drawing ore from mines across Jefferson County and from more distant operations in Idaho. The scale of the operation required a constant supply of fuel, and the charcoal kilns and wood-cutting operations in the surrounding mountains were as much a part of the industrial system as the smelter itself. The Northern Pacific Railroad spur, completed in December 1883, was the artery that made the whole system function, carrying ore in and metal out and connecting Wickes to the larger economy of the Pacific Northwest.

Then came 1893. The repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act in July of that year removed the federal government's obligation to purchase silver at a fixed price, and the price of silver collapsed almost immediately. The smelter at Wickes closed. The mines shut down. A fire destroyed the reduction works. The population fell from fifteen hundred to five hundred within a few years, and to fewer than a hundred by 1900. Subsequent fires in 1900 and 1902 burned the business district, the depot, the hospital, and the post office in succession, removing the institutional infrastructure that might have supported a revival. A school continued operating into the 1930s, and a few families stayed on through the mid-twentieth century, sustained by sporadic mining and tailings reprocessing. The post office closed in 1964, and with it went the last official acknowledgment that Wickes was a place where people lived.

What Remains Today

The ruins of Wickes are scattered across the valley floor and the surrounding slopes, a mix of collapsed structures, stone foundations, and the earthwork signatures of the mining operations. The scale of what was once here is legible in the landscape if you know what to look for: the tailings piles, the cuts and fills of the old railroad grade, the depressions where buildings once stood. The Montana Department of Environmental Quality's Abandoned Mine Lands program has done revegetation work in the area to address erosion and stabilize soils disturbed by the old mining operations.

No formal park or visitor infrastructure exists at the site. The area is accessible to the public, but visitors should be aware of the hazards associated with old mine workings.

Visiting

Wickes is located approximately four miles southwest of Jefferson City in Jefferson County, about eighteen miles south-southeast of Helena. The site is accessible by gravel road. No services are available at the townsite. The nearest services are in Boulder, the Jefferson County seat, approximately fifteen miles to the south.