Butte: Old Lexington Gardens

By editor

Butte, Silver Bow County, Montana

There’s a certain kind of stubbornness to a place that can dig more than $43 billion worth of minerals out of a single hill and still call it home. That place is Butte, Montana -- a name that might not rattle the national conversation much these days, but once shook the earth with enough force to launch fortunes, labor wars, and railroads right into the history books. They called it the Richest Hill on Earth, and not just for show. By the middle of the twentieth century, no other mine district on this globe had plundered so much wealth from its soil.

The hill was a machine shop, a city, a battlefield, and a melting pot all rolled into one. Imagine nine railroads converging on one spot, each fighting for a slice of the haul. Picture over 10,000 miles of tunnels mapped beneath your feet -- enough to circle the earth and then some. The population? Ethnically diverse enough to make Ellis Island blush, drawn by the promise of quick riches and the noise of the stamp mills. And if you fancied a different sort of business, Butte boasted the largest red-light district in the American West, proving that where there’s money, there’s appetite.

Now, at the heart of this mountain of industry was the Old Lexington Stamp Mill. This was Butte’s first stamp mill, a machine designed to crush ore into a fine sand so the precious minerals could be coaxed out. It wasn’t a glamourous job, but someone had to do it. Charles Hendrie built the original five-stamp mill here in 1867, just as Butte was shaking off its early dirt and dust. Soon after, Hendrie vanished from the scene -- left town and never looked back, like a man who knew the hill had more tricks up its sleeve than a one-trick miner.

Enter Andrew Jackson Davis, a man who came to the hill with less fanfare and more business sense. Davis held a lien on the property and took over the mill. For nine years, the mill sat quiet as a church mouse, idle and waiting for a way to make sense of Butte’s devilishly complex ore. It wasn’t until 1877 that the mill finally roared to life, enlarged to ten stamps, and began pounding away on January 23rd. The process that made this possible was a new method to extract metals from ore compounds that had previously defied profit.

Davis was no ordinary prospector. He had left home at thirteen to run errands for a Boston merchant and by twenty-nine had built the first chain stores along the Mississippi River. He came to Butte in 1864 betting that the surface veins of ore could be turned into gold. He was right. By the time he died in 1890, the Old Lexington Mill had expanded to twenty stamps and crushed around the clock. Davis left behind a fortune estimated between $105 million and $165 million in today’s money -- a tidy sum, but paltry compared to the billionaires who would follow in his footsteps.

In 1881, Davis sold the mill and the adjoining Lexington Mine to a French syndicate for $1 million -- the largest single transaction in Butte up to that time. That sale was a harbinger of the international interest Butte would draw as the hill’s riches grew harder to wrestle. The French investors brought capital and modern mining techniques, but also a different brand of corporate ambition and detachment from the rough-and-tumble life of the miners.

Butte wasn’t just about rocks and money. It was a place where labor found its voice amid the clang of the mills and the smoke of the smelters. The miners’ struggle here was fierce and often bloody, a real-life drama of unions, strikes, and sometimes outright violence. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, the giant that swallowed up nearly every other operation, often found itself at odds with workers determined to wrest a fair wage from the hill’s depths.

The hill also created more wealth per citizen than anywhere else on earth up to that time. This was a magnet for immigrants -- Irish, Finnish, Italian, Chinese, Serbian, and many others -- all chasing a slice of the mountain’s bounty. The mix of cultures made Butte a unique community, complex and sometimes conflicted, but undeniably vibrant.

Yet, the mountain had a long shadow. Decades of mining left behind vast piles of toxic waste and polluted waterways. Butte sits at the headwaters of the Columbia River, in what’s considered one of North America’s most biologically diverse places. The industrial aftermath was so severe that Butte became the site of the nation’s largest environmental cleanup project, an ongoing effort to manage the scars left by a century of mining.

A newspaper from the era quoted Andrew Jackson Davis on his philosophy: "You can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs." Davis knew the hill was a hard master, but he also understood that fortune favors the patient and the bold. He wasn’t wrong, but neither was the mountain generous. It gave up its wealth slowly, at great cost to those who toiled in its tunnels and those who lived in its dust.

Today, the Old Lexington Gardens site invites visitors to consider the mountain that made Butte and the men and machines that shaped it. The stamp mill may be silent now, but the history it crushed into the hill remains louder than ever.

See also

• Butte at Butte, Silver Bow County
• Anaconda Road at Butte, Silver Bow County
• The Boulder Batholith and the Richest Hill on Earth at Butte, Silver Bow County