This episode wraps up our Life Underground series and looks back on the process of making the Verdigris Project. We talk with all the teammates on the project about the process for making their part of it, and look at what the value of an oral history collection can be. We chat with Aubrey Jaap, Daniel Hogan, Dick Gibson, Marian Jensen, Adrian Kien, and composer Charles Nichols about what the Verdigris Project meant to them.

Author and historian Teresa Jordan once undertook a large oral history project in Butte for a project she called Butte, America: Lessons From a Deindustrialized Town. Her work has been extremely influential on the production of these programs. In this episode, we look at what happened after copper mining ceased in the mid 1980s, and how the age of Superfund came into being as mining eventually resumed under the new company Montana Resources

Uptown Butte is the historic central business district, distinguished from more modern, strip-mall style development down in the ‘Flats.’ In this episode, we examine the Uptown from its peak in 1917 to modern day efforts to redevelop the largely vacant urban core. From the fires of the 1970s to the demolition initiative called Butte Forward, we look deeply at the complexity of one of America’s largest National Historic Landmark districts.

Today, Broadway Street abruptly ends just past the Helsinki Bar with barricades, fencing, and the eastern edge of the Berkeley Pit. What was the East Side of Butte like before the pit consumed it? We speak with longtime UM professor Fred McGlynn and several others to learn the history of Finntown and East Butte, neighborhoods destroyed by open pit mining.

In this episode, we look at the history of unions and their meeting halls in Butte and survey the work that’s been done since 2014 to preserve and restore the Carpenters Union Hall.

The fabric of the Butte community has often been held together by the matriarchs of large families that lived on the Butte hill. In this episode, we hear from Virginia Salazar and Irene Scheidecker, both part of large Butte families.

The history of unionism in Butte, Montana is well documented. We refer to it as the Gibraltar of Labor because union roots run so deep here. In this episode, we look back at how strikes affected families and community, and how the town often pulled together to support strikers.

There’s a refrain you often hear about Butte, Montana. They say Butte’s copper electrified the world and won two world wars. As Fritz Daily might put it, “if it wasn’t for Butte, we could be having this conversation in Japanese or German.”

The Catholic Church was central to all aspects of life in the Butte community for nearly a century. In this episode, we hear from longtime Butte residents about their experiences within the church. For most, it was a center point of spirituality, charity work and activism that gave them purpose. For others, it was a source of lifelong trauma.

After Atlantic Richfield bought the remaining pieces of the Anaconda Company empire in Montana in 1977, they only lasted about 5 years before they closed all mining and smelting in Montana permanently. It was a bad time for the people of Butte and thousands of men were out of work.

Sometimes the fate of an entire city, or an entire watershed can be made with one decision, one moment in time. These kinds of decisions might be made in a state capitol, or deep within the walls of a government agency, or in a corporate board room. Few decisions have affected a community as much as Atlantic Richfield’s decision in 1982 to turn off the underground water pumps in the Kelley Mine in Butte, Montana.

Today we’re underground in a Butte mine with Larry Hoffman, an old time miner and instructor of mining engineering at Montana Tech. Along with my colleague Daniel Hogan, we’re descending into the mine on foot with Larry.

With so much attention on the men who worked in the underground mines of Butte, I was left wondering: were there women working underground? If so, what was it like for them? Well, it turns out that there were a few women working in the underground mines, though they are a rare exception to the norm.

The town of Anaconda sits about 24 miles to the west of Butte, Montana, and the two communities are intimately linked by industry. While Butte was where they mucked the copper ore out of the mines and hoisted the rock to surface, Anaconda was where there smelted it.

here’s a great sense of loss about these neighborhoods in Butte, even today. With so many empty lots in the historic district, we’re left with only photos of a grand mining metropolis that is no more. With Meaderville, the loss is even more extreme; the very ground that the people once lived on has been blasted into pieces and hauled away to the mill and smelter.

We look at the transition from underground mining to the open pit, and we get a sense of how close Butte came to tearing itself apart to keep the Anaconda Company going. Butte, Montana is a model city, or at least it was. Back in the late 1960s, America’s biggest copper mining town was deteriorating.

In this episode, we take a second look at the Anaconda Company and hear stories from the men who worked for this company, which for decades was one of the biggest industrial operators in the world.

The history book tale of the Anaconda Company is but one version. This company was ultimately made up of individual lives, men and women who bought their homes, educated and fed their families and built their lives with the wages earned on Anaconda’s time.

In this episode, we take a look at what it was actually like to work underground on the Butte hill, and we hear the unique voices of the men who were there, as we draw from the oral history collection at the Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives.

We begin Life Underground by taking a look at the geology of the Butte mineral deposit, known as the Richest Hill on Earth. Just how did the mineralization occur that resulted in America’s richest and longest-lasting mining camp?