Although land was always at a premium in industrial, booming Butte, whether for mine activities or businesses and homes, as early as 1906 Butte had two public playgrounds.

William Hogan was a teamster at the Moulton Mine in Walkerville, where he boarded at the American House on the north side of Daly between A and B Streets. At least, that was his job until the silver crisis of 1893 threw many employees at the Moulton out of work.

Paxson’s iconic work includes many portraits of Native Americans, who he considered friends, but his definitive piece is probably “Custer’s Last Stand,” produced in the Woolman Street studio between 1895 and 1899. Paxson had become fascinated by the battle that took place just a year before he arrived in Montana, and interviewed both Native Americans and U.S. soldiers who had been involved in the campaign as part of his research for the painting.

When Chin Chun Hock visited Butte in October 1898, the Butte Miner headlined its report “The King of the Chinamen Will Construct a Building.” While he wasn’t actually king of anything, Hock, whose name is sometimes given as Chun Ching Hock, was certainly the most prominent Chinese businessman in Seattle.

It’s well known that placer mining in Silver Bow Creek and lode, or hard-rock mining in the veins on the Butte hill began almost simultaneously, in 1864. With the advent of underground mining for silver beginning in 1875, we tend to think of Butte’s mining story as beneath the surface.

Although Anaconda has some elements of a company town, the ultimate company town in southwest Montana has to be Ramsay. The town was built in 1916-17 by the DuPont chemical company to house officials and workers for their new dynamite manufacturing plant about a half mile to the north (across the interstate from Ramsay today).

Homestake was once home to some 400 residents, including some of the first African-American settlers in southwestern Montana. When Charles and Elizabeth Flagg and their 10-year-old daughter Janettia came by covered wagon to Butte in 1880, the Montana census counted 346 Black residents out of a total of 39,159.

James Welch established a granite quarry on the east side of the Continental Divide in 1899 to supply building stone to Butte and beyond. The granite there is more or less the same as the Butte Granite across hundreds of square miles, but it’s much less decomposed than some of the granite around Butte, and it’s already partly ready to quarry because of near-horizontal cracks.

The American Protective Association, the A.P.A., was anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant, anti-Irish, and anti-union. Butte may seem like a strange place for such sentiments to take hold, but they did, briefly, in the 1890s.

“Montana Copper Company” has a nice, simple ring to it. But it was based in New York, owned by the immigrant Jewish German Lewisohn Brothers, and it forms the corporate basis for some of Butte’s and Montana’s most important industrial developments.

The Shortridge Christian Church was built in 1893. The land at the corner of Washington and Mercury Streets cost $3,065 in 1891, an “inflated” price, according to financially strapped church elders, and the structure itself cost $10,000 plus $2,000 more for the furnishings. All this for an initial congregation numbering 53.

With a name like Butte & Zenith City Mining Company, you might expect it to be related to some lost mining town called Zenith City somewhere near Butte, but you’d be wrong. The Zenith City in this connection is nearly 1,100 miles from Butte. It’s Duluth, Minnesota.

Flour for making bread was in great demand in the early mining camps of western Montana. W.A. Clark famously began his mercantile career by bringing flour, butter, tobacco, and eggs to Bannack in the winter of 1863-64, where he made a 1500% profit on eggs purchased in Salt Lake City.

In 1903, the six-year-old Congregation B’nai Israel began construction of the synagogue that still stands in that block. Ex-Senator Lee Mantle spoke at the dedication in February 1904 which was led by Rabbi Harry Weiss.

In 1905, the board of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway, the “Milwaukee Road,” approved a $45-million extension of their track into the Pacific Northwest. At a cost equivalent of more than $1.3 billion today, it would in many places run parallel with the track of their competitor, the Northern Pacific.

The Butte Reduction Works was built in 1883 as a custom smelter processing ore for the Lewisohn Brothers’ Butte & Boston and Boston & Montana companies and others, but it failed and was purchased in 1885 by employees of the Parrott Smelter.

Butte’s people found relaxation in diverse ways, but two hot springs, Gregson (Fairmont) to the west and Pipestone, 33 miles to the southeast, were among the most popular destinations.

Sometimes discoveries in Butte take us well beyond the local story. In 2011 when Chuck Schnabel was renovating the Grand Hotel on Broadway Street to relocate Quarry Brewing there, he found a movie poster inside the wall for “Betty’s Nightmare.”

Brooklyn-born F. Augustus Heinze arrived in Butte in 1889, and with help from a $50,000 inheritance, soon established the Montana Ore Purchasing (M.O.P.) Company and by 1894 had opened a huge new mill-smelter complex just south of Meaderville on the east side of the hill.

All told, the Butte School District constructed 14 schools or major additions between 1916 and 1921. On the flats, school district architect Wellington Smith designed three almost identical schools in the collegiate-gothic style: Madison, Hawthorne, and Longfellow.