Butte, America’s Story Episode 14 - First Jail

Welcome to Butte, America’s Story. I’m your host, Dick Gibson

Thousands of people have visited Butte’s City Jail on Broadway Street as tourists, and a few of those visitors spent some involuntary time there before it closed in 1971. And a restaurant on Park Street retains the bars from the jail there, in the original City Hall, built in 1884. But there was a jail before there was a city hall. The western edge of town in 1884 was about at Jackson Street, which was also the western boundary of the original Butte townsite platted in 1866 and retained when Butte City was incorporated in 1879. Jackson Street didn’t extend continuously in 1884. South of Park Street, Jackson was mapped as “arbitrary” and north of Broadway there was nothing but “detached buildings,” another arbitrary stretch called Grizzly Street in 1888.

Today’s intersection of Jackson and Mercury Streets is the site of the Stephens Mine, located pretty much in the middle of that junction. It operated from before 1884 until after 1888, and the structures there burned in 1890. By then, the West Side was growing by leaps and bounds.

In 1884 when the new City Hall and its jail were built on Park Street, the old jail still stood on what is now Jackson, between Park and Galena Streets. The large building on the west side of the street measured about 50’x25’ and had a fenced jail yard, two small outbuildings, and a stable. It was gone by 1888, replaced by dwellings, stables, and a mattress factory on Park Street.

Was that Butte’s first jail? Probably, but there’s no documentation to be certain. It was likely built about 1879 when the town was incorporated, but there may well have been other places used for incarceration before then. In the gold camp of the 1860s, however, at least one case is known of a man demonstrably guilty of stabbing another, but he was acquitted by the jury because “there was no jail handy in which to imprison him,” according to the 1897 “Story of Butte,” published by the Butte Bystander newspaper.

Silver Bow County wasn’t organized until 1881 when it was separated from Deer Lodge County. When the first county court house was erected in 1884, it was connected to a complex on the north side that served as the jail and sheriff’s residence, with a separate women’s jail to the east. Contemporary with the construction of the new county court house in 1912, a new jail was built on Alaska Street. When the 1890 city jail was closed in 1971, that county jail served both the city and the county, and when the two governments merged in 1977 the county jail was used for the combined city and county of Butte-Silver Bow. Today that old jail is the Sheriff’s offices, and there’s a new jail at Quartz and Montana, built in 2004.

As writer Edwin Dobb has said, "Like Concord, Gettysburg, and Wounded Knee, Butte is one of the places America came from." Join us next time for more of Butte, America’s Story.

This episode appeared in slightly different form in the Montana Standard newspaper.