Life Underground Episode 6 - One Long Street
Life Underground - Episode 006
“One Long Street”
[Nan Joyce]
This is an interview with Nan Joyce, part of the oral history collection from Chris Fisk’s Butte history course at Butte high school. Today we look at the destruction of Butte’s predominantly Italian neighborhood of Meaderville, a large scale demolition that made way for the Berkeley Pit.
Here’s just another snapshot from Nan Joyce.
[Nan Joyce]
Meaderville was one of several ethnic neighborhoods of the old Butte, and was predominantly Italian. I find the story of Meaderville (and the other East Side neighborhoods like McQueen) so fascinating because of the complete and utter destruction that was wrought upon them in the 1950s and 60s. There just aren’t many cities on Earth that have been eaten away by a giant open pit mine like these neighborhoods were. With the neighborhoods built up right around the mines, it meant that thousands of buildings were sitting atop the mineral deposit. When mining changed from underground to the open pit, these people were gradually bought out by the Anaconda Company and moved to other parts of the city or moved out of Butte entirely, to make way for the giant machines that would turn the Butte hill into a giant hole. The exodus from these old ethnic neighborhoods left vacant buildings that were then buried, demolished or burned.
There’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. The land upon which this community was built now sits in the sky, high above the toxic lake that has filled the open pit that ate the town. There is no going home for Meaderville. There is no ground to stand on. There are only memories.
This is Life Underground. I’m Clark Grant. Today we’ll remember the neighborhoods that once thrived just east of Butte. McQueen, Meaderville and East Butte are all gone today, erased by the enormous mining complex that still operates on the edge of town.
That 7000 acre moonscape that we see today was once home to thousands of people, many of them immigrants and their descendants, and the stories of their lives that we’ll hear on this episode illuminate with beautiful detail some of the practices they brought from the ‘old country,’ as they called it. Whether it was making homemade wine, canning meats, or baking bread, the consensus from our oral history collection is that life in Meaderville was pretty damn good. We’ll begin today by reaching way back, all the way to the turn of the 20th century, with stories from John Sconfienza. He was interviewed by Ray Calkins in 1979, who begins by asking John about his parents.
[John Sconfienza]
John Sconfienza recalls his childhood in Meaderville fondly, but the work at the family bakery and in their home was hard and it started young.
[John Sconfienza]
As the Great Depression set in, Sconfienza’s had to find ways to stay afloat. Here, John tells us how he started bootlegging flour to stay in business during those tough years.
[John Sconfienza]
That was John Sconfienza, whose family ran a bakery in Meaderville for many years. He was interviewed by Ray Calkins in June of 1979. Mr. Sconfienza died later that same year, on Christmas Day, at the age of 73.
Listening to an array of oral histories about Meaderville, from people who grew up there and their descendants, the overwhelming consensus is that Meaderville was a lively place. It was a wide-open little town full of nightclubs and nice places to get a good meal. It was also a tight-knit neighborhood, the kind of place where everyone know each other and people looked out for one another.
With the dangerous working conditions and the booms and busts of the industry, mining communities often build those tight relationships, which sometimes span the whole continent. Many Italians who came to Meaderville to work in the mines had strong connections with Italian miners in the upper peninsula of Michigan, which was the largest copper producing district in the world until Butte later surpassed it.
Russell Magnaghi, a professor of history from Northern Michigan University, came to Butte in 1983 to speak with members of the Italian community. He had written several articles about the social and ethnic history of the Upper Peninsula in Michigan. Professor Magnaghi interviewed several Italians in Butte during his visit, including Angelo Petroni. Petroni was born in a log cabin in Meaderville in 1928, and he grew up in a time where adults spoke Italian in the home, and nearly everyone tended to large gardens that sustained them throughout the year. Petroni fondly recalls how they would can Swiss chard, potatoes and a huge variety of other vegetables.
[Angelo Petroni]
Descriptions of Meaderville often make me hungry, with the talk of so much good homemade food. Other than the good food coming from the homes, the night clubs and supper clubs were places where people from Butte and the surrounding areas would travel to have a meal, go out drinking, and dance. Petroni says they really started going early last century.
[Angelo Petroni]
It was the death of them, says Angelo Petroni in that interview from 1983. Though he seemed to grieve Meaderville, Angelo made a life after being forced to move out of his neighborhood. He was manager of the Bert Mooney Airport for 25 years. He lived until age 86 when he passed away June 9, 2015 at home, surrounded by his family. His obituary says that he “loved hunting, fishing and spending time with friends and family at the cabin south of Butte. His elk sausage and salami were delicacies for all. He never passed up the opportunity to check a line for mushrooms as he drove through the Highlands or Vipond Park.”
The living memory of Meaderville is fading away, but there are some that still remember the old days of gambling and dinner clubs in the Italian oasis. Harp Cote was 97 when Aubrey Jaap collected his oral history at his office in the warehouse district of Butte. He told us how he bought the Copper Club in Meaderville with his friend Tuck in the mid 1940s.
[Harp Cote]
Harp Cote joins the growing chorus of folks who raved about the food in Meaderville. A particularly special Italian delicacy really left a mark on him.
[Harp Cote]
Harp and his business partner ran the Copper Club in Meaderville for just a couple of years, but it was the beginning of a real estate empire in Butte that Harp still oversees to this day, with the assistance of his large family.
[music]
This is Life Underground. Today we’re remembering Meaderville and the other communities on the east side of Butte that were demolished to make way for the Berkeley Pit. Often you’ll hear about how Butte was an ethnic melting pot in the middle of the Rocky Mountains, how the no-smoking signs in the mines were written in 17 languages. Much of that ethnic diversity is gone today, along with the communities those people inhabited. But some of their voices remain. When you hear the voice of Louis Bartoletti, you know he came from another time and place, the ‘old country,’ you might call it. He was interviewed by Margie Bukvich and John M. Sullivan, students at Butte Central High School, as part of a Bicentennial project.
[Louis Bartoletti]
As I mentioned before, the living memory of Meaderville is fading away, but there are still some folks who lived there and who remember. Along with Meaderville, there were other neighborhoods on the east side of Butte that met their demise at the hands of the Anaconda Company’s Berkeley Pit. In addition to the Italian neighborhood of Meaderville, there was also McQueen, Finn Town and East Butte. Next we hear from Tom Holter, whose oral history was collected by Aubrey Jaap at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives, as part of the Verdigris Project.
[Tom Holter]
We’ve mostly heard about the restaurants in Meaderville, but there were also quite a few neighborhood grocery stores and other markets as well.
Tom Holter grew up and went to work in the mines of Butte. For decades, he was on a crew called the rope gang, which would work in some of the most dangerous situations in the mines, including wrecks in the mine shafts. Tom worked underground for many years, hoisting heavy machinery up and down the mine shafts and doing the many jobs of the rope gang, which was part of the ironworkers. He was injured while rigging a giant fuel tank on surface after he had gone to work in the Berkeley Pit, and that basically ended his mining career.
Tom also bartended over the years, and he told us about McQueen Club, which he was president of for 16 years. When it came time for the Berkeley Pit to move into the land the Club sat on, he started in with negotiations with the Company.
[Tom Holter]
With so much trouble after being forced out of McQueen, and with the fabric of these neighborhoods being torn apart by the Berkeley Pit, I asked Tom Holter if people opposed the forced relocation at all.
[Tom Holter]
Tom Holter built his family and sent his children to college with his wages from the very company that destroyed his home town. That complicated relationship between the Butte community and mine upon which it is built came up time and time again in these oral history recordings. How could people fight the mine as it tore down the town, when it was the mine that was responsible for the town in the first place? Older generations of Butte people were either unmoved or just unaware of the changes that were destroying neighborhoods and changing Butte forever. In our next clip, Jim Moyle reflects on his parents and how their neighborhood on the east side was slowly erased.
[Jim Moyle]
Jim Moyle’s family was the last one to sell out to the Company on that block of Mercury Street, and those funny details of the destruction of a neighborhood are what fascinate me most about the story of Butte’s Berkeley Pit. How many strange occurrences like that did people experience as their town was eaten away?
This is Life Underground. When we come back, we hear more memories from Meaderville.
[Kim Garwood]
Those famous Meaderville dinners were made by hundreds of Italian immigrants and their children. In one of those restaurants worked a lady named Katie Gaida Plessas. She is now the subject of a book called Katie’s Story, written by her son Don Plessas. We spoke with Don at the Butte-Silver Bow Archives.
[Don Plessas]
Don Plessas grew up in Meaderville, but his childhood there didn’t last long. He recalls his childhood exploits with a mischievous glint in his eye.
[Don Plessas]
You can’t talk about Meaderville without talking about food, and Don’s mother Katie did love to cook, but not always how some of the family wanted her to.
[Don Plessas]
Those practices largely died out when the neighborhood of Meaderville was broken up by the Anaconda Company as the Berkeley Pit ate away the Butte hill. Gone are the little groceries, the nice restaurants, and the nightclubs. Gone is the fabric of the east side neighborhoods, the relationships, the traditions and the bonds that held people together through tough times. We asked Don Plessas how these people felt when they were bought out and forced out of their homes.
[Don Plessas]
Notice that Don mentions Sconfienza’s bakery, who we heard from at the beginning of the program. I do wonder what those breadsticks tasted like.
[music]
To close out the program today, we revisit the notion of fighting back against the Anaconda Company, and ask Don Plessas what people did, if anything, to try and prevent the destruction of their neighborhoods, and what the Company tactics might have been to force people to move.
[Don Plessas]
Thousands of structures were town down to make way for the Berkeley Pit, and Meaderville wasn’t the only neighborhood affected of course. We touched on McQueen, but there was also East Butte, Finn Town, Dublin Gulch, and areas in between. It’s hard to calculate the permanent loss of these communities, and impossible to know how much tax revenue they might have generated for the city and county of Butte over the last half century if they had been allowed to remain. In considering whether the trade off was worth it, whether it was, in the long run, worth it to dig the Berkeley Pit, consider not only the painful loss of neighborhoods and community. Consider also the perpetual cost of managing the 50-billion gallon toxic lake that has formed inside the pit, and the legacy of pollution it has left for Butte.
[music]
Life Underground is part of the Verdigris Project. Hear this and other programs at verdigrisproject.org. For KBMF, I’m Clark Grant. Thanks for listening.