About

The Verdigris Project

In late 2017, the Butte America Foundation was awarded a $30,000 challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for The Verdigris Project. Verdigris includes three distinct radio series that draw from hundreds of oral histories held at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives, audio productions that tell the story of Butte's mining and cultural history to a national radio/online audience. The project also included the recording and transcription of 100 new oral histories. These new oral histories focus on Butte's mining history and cultural traditions, and were recorded at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives between 2018-2022.

The goal of Verdigris is to tell the stories of working people in Butte, one of the world's richest mining districts, through the oral histories of those who lived and worked on the Butte hill. Part of this process included collecting and transcribing new oral histories. The interviews in the oral history collection are primarily life histories and touch on a variety of subjects including mining practices, immigrant traditions, the expansion of the Berkeley pit and the corresponding destruction of neighborhoods, and Butte's century-long population decline.

The Verdigris oral history collection builds on the work of experts including Mary Murphy, Teresa Jordan, and Ray Calkins, all of whom conducted similar oral history projects in Butte in the 1980s. At the time, the mines had closed and Butte's severe economic downturn was underway. 40+ years later, the Verdigris Project is picking up the work of recording Butte's oral history, tracking the ongoing effects of mining and the consequences that come from an economy of extraction. This oral history collection is a continuation of previous efforts to preserve the voices of miners and their families, but will also serve as a source for new research in the future when historians (and others) are curious about events on the Butte hill from 1980-onward.

The guiding principle of the Verdigris Project can be summarized with a quote from Ed Dobb, the famed author with Butte roots. It speaks to the importance of oral history and, if not recording, then at least just listening to our elders while we still have them around. It comes from a 1999 article in High Country News, called Mining the Past. Looking at the post-industrial fallout brought about from Butte’s unfettered capitalism, Dobb critiques the notion of progress.

He writes, “They are the last surviving members of an occupational tribe that soon will be extinct. Their way of life, their subculture, is vanishing, as part of the transition to the so-called New West. Before their voices fall silent, consigning to oblivion all that they have seen and done, we might do well to pull up a chair and listen to their testimony, if for no other reason than to disabuse ourselves of the naive notion - a stubbornly Western notion, it should be admitted - that the future necessarily will be better than the past.”

Take a moment to listen to the interviews in the oral history collection, along with the documentary programs within the Verdigris Project. Butte’s living memory - of the mines, the bustling city that once was, and the Company - resides in these recordings.