By Butch Larcombe
The history of Butte, Montana, is pockmarked with tragedy. An 1895 explosion at a warehouse storing mining explosives killed 58 people, including 13 firefighters. The funeral procession drew an estimated crowd of 20,000. The Granite Mountain-Speculator fire in 1917 claimed 168 lives and remains the deadliest hard-rock mining incident in U.S. history. On a wintry November morning in 1950, a Northwest Airlines plane crashed on Butte’s East Ridge, killing 22, and claiming the sad title of Montana’s worst air disaster.
Amid these tragedies, an unremarkable building fire on the outskirts of Butte in November 1973 is seared into the memories of generations of the city’s residents and Montanans across the state. The blaze in the Arcade building at the Columbia Gardens, a sprawling recreational park and social hub, destroyed 46 hand-carved and carefully painted wooden horses, the key pieces of the carousel that many regarded as the centerpiece of the Gardens, once described as “68 acres of heaven just east of the Richest Hill on Earth.”
The carousel horses and pieces of other carnival-style rides, tabbed as “priceless” in a newspaper headline the day after the fire, represented the last filament of hope for the Gardens. About eight months before the fire, Robert Weed, the head of the Anaconda Company’s primary metals division, and for decades the owner and operator of almost all major mining operations in Butte, told attendees at a Rotary Club meeting that the upcoming summer would be the last season for the landmark park. The Gardens property, which sat near the massive Berkeley Pit, would become the site of an expanded copper mining operation, the East Pit. Weed also noted the company’s plans to expand the Berkeley Pit even closer to the city’s historic uptown and raised the possibility that the commercial center might eventually need to be relocated to make room for mine expansion.
On Labor Day, an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 people made a final pilgrimage to the Gardens. In the coming fall days, the wooden carousel horses, pieces of a popular biplane ride and other items were stored in the Arcade building, with hopes they could land elsewhere in Butte. The fire two months later consumed those hopes.
A state fire marshal quickly ruled out arson, and the fire was officially blamed on a faulty electrical transformer. But a cloud of suspicion about the 1973 fire still hangs over Butte. In the days after the fire, letters to the editor in The Montana Standard, Butte’s daily newspaper, expressed skepticism about the transformer explanation. Stories circulated in the city that electrical service to the building had been shut off at least a month before the fire.
Many fingers were pointed at the Anaconda Company, with allegations that the mining giant wanted the Columbia Gardens buildings and structures gone as soon as possible to speed development of the new open-pit mine. There were accusations of arson, a hot topic in Butte in the 1970s. In the first three years of that decade there were 28 major fires, many in uptown Butte. Just a few months before the fire at the Gardens, a spectacular blaze destroyed the ornate five-story Medical Arts Building, which sat prominently on the corner of Park and Main streets. That fire drew a crowd of several thousand onlookers.
Even in 2026, more than five decades after the Arcade building fire, a Facebook page dedicated to memories of the Columbia Gardens has a number of comments about the fire.
“Lots of cool memories were taken away by pure greed and the fire was not [the result of] a transformer,” one person wrote. “It was purposely set. Everyone knows this to be true.” Another social-media cynic doubted the transformer explanation, instead blaming “Anaconda Company goons, just like all the other totally non-suspicious fires that hit parts of uptown Butte that were later incorporated into the (Berkeley) pit.”
The 1973 fire and speedy demolition of the remainder of the Gardens made for a sad ending to a decades-long love story. The creator of the Gardens was an unlikely character—W.A. Clark, the often-reviled Butte Copper King. Clark in 1899 bought 23 acres for a reported $30,000, about 3.5 miles east of the Mining City’s uptown business district. He quickly set about developing what was later described as “one of the West’s most beautiful recreation spots.”
The early version of the Gardens featured a lake for swimming and boating, a fish hatchery, a zoo filled with Montana wildlife, a herbarium, greenhouses, a pavilion with a huge dance floor and acres of flower gardens, grass and trees. And there were the amusement rides, including the colorful carousel and a legendary three-story wooden roller coaster, likely the only permanent coaster ever built in Montana.
Clark, who reportedly spent more than $1 million to develop Columbia Gardens, also expanded his Butte Electric Railway Company to include a line running from the center of the city to ferry visitors to the site. On Arbor Day, in May 1901, a Butte newspaper reported that 15,000 people took advantage of free trolley rides to visit the fledgling Gardens. It quickly became an oasis in a gritty city where trees and grass were scarce, and mining dominated many facets of life.
In the ensuing years, a stadium at the Gardens played host to professional and amateur baseball games, football contests and other gatherings, including the popular Miners’ Union Day events. While Columbia Gardens changed and evolved over the years, it remained a popular place for picnics, birthday parties, family gatherings and dances for all ages. Clark set aside a day each week as a Children’s Day, offering free trolley rides and admission and reduced prices for park attractions. Children’s Day became a tradition that continued to the final days of the Gardens.
While Columbia Gardens changed and evolved over the years, it remained a popular place for picnics, birthday parties, family gatherings and dances for all ages.
Generations of Montanans were enthralled. Ellen Crain, a local historian who helped lead the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives, a repository for all things Butte, was a teenager when the Gardens disappeared. “There was no place like it in Montana,” she told The Montana Standard 30 years after the Gardens closed. “It was wonderful.”
Along with the disputed 1973 fire, another mystery simmers: Why did Clark, largely viewed as a ruthless capitalist who would become one of the wealthiest men in America thanks to ventures in mining, banking, railroads and real estate, invest heavily in a recreation area that offered little prospect of financial return?
Some believe that during a tour of Butte, the Copper King was struck by the need for Butte children to have a safe place to play away from the city’s streets and alleys. A less charitable explanation revolves around Clark’s desire to serve in the United States Senate. His 1899 campaign to win Montana legislative appointment to a seat was tainted by a bribery scandal that forced his resignation. Some view his spending spree to develop the Gardens as an attempt to curry support for his continued political aspirations. Clark ultimately secured a Senate seat in 1901 and served one term.
Motives aside, Clark appeared to have genuine affinity for the Gardens. “The Columbia Gardens is my monument,” Clark said, according to an account in The War of the Copper Kings, a 1935 book by author C.B. Glasscock. “Of my many business enterprises it is the one I love the best, and it’s practically the only one on which I lose money.”
After his death in 1925, Clark’s heirs sold his Montana operations, including the Columbia Gardens, to the Anaconda Company. Along with maintaining the area, Anaconda added amusement attractions and refurbished the popular roller coaster. While the electric trolley was discontinued, the company replaced it with bus service, at least for the weekly Children’s Day and other events.
Anaconda, at one point the fourth-largest company in the U.S. as measured in financial terms, appeared to operate the money-losing Gardens for decades as a community relations tool. But Anaconda’s fortunes took a serious hit in the early 1970s when its mines in Chile and Mexico were nationalized. By some estimates, those foreign operations accounted for three-fourths of the company’s profits.
With the Gardens losing more than $200,000 per year and Anaconda desperate to boost its domestic copper production with its Butte operations, the closure announcement early in 1973 wasn’t a big surprise. But to the community, which had endured fires, strikes and the downsizing of the Anaconda operations and workforce, the loss of Columbia Gardens, a treasured part of Butte for nearly 75 years, was a staggering psychological blow and to some, a betrayal.
“With the Gardens destruction, many came to the troubling conclusion that nothing was sacred: Not even the very survival of the community was safe from corporate consumption.”
— Janet Finn
Butte-raised author Janet Finn summarized that sentiment in her 2023 book Tracing the Veins. “With the Gardens destruction,” she wrote, “many came to the troubling conclusion that nothing was sacred: Not even the very survival of the community was safe from corporate consumption.”
Many still mourn the loss and likely agree with the late Pat Williams, Montana’s longest-serving member of Congress and a Mining City native who described the loss of Columbia Gardens as “one of the greatest tragedies of Butte.”
Butch Larcombe worked for 30 years as a newspaper reporter and editor and as the editor of Montana Magazine. His book, Montana Disasters: True Stories of Treasure State Tragedies and Triumphs, was published in 2021. His most recent book, Historic Tales of Flathead Lake, was published in 2024. He lives near Bigfork.
