Dubbed the ‘richest hill on earth’, for over 120 years Butte built its fortune primarily on copper mining and became home to some of the world's wealthiest men; the elaborate homes that they constructed remain.
The Cornish were the largest ethnic group until the early twentieth when they were displaced by the Irish. Townships such as Walkerville, Meaderville and Centerville became household names in Cornwall. The history of Butte is intimately associated with labour relations, unionisation of the mining industry and ethnic clashes, especially among the Irish and the Cornish.
The huge open-pit mine, the Berkeley, opened in 1955 and its expansion forced the relocation of one fifth of Butte's population. However, the remainder of historic Butte and ‘the hill’ (the area above and around Butte that contained all the minerals and where most active mining was done) has been spared primarily because of rapid development of the modern ‘drag’ on the plain below (with its fast food outlets, superstores and various motels). This has ensured that many of the town’s historic buildings have survived relatively unchanged. A huge Freemason’s Hall and several Protestant and Catholic churches are extant, while numerous bars and saloons have their art deco features intact, and early C20th advertisements can still be seen on the exterior of the brick built buildings. There are good examples of the miner’s wooden cabins in the streets around the town. Numerous mine headframes (gallus frames) survive, including the Anselmo, the Steward, the Original, the Travona, the Belmont, the Kelly, the Mountain Con, the Lexington, the Bell/Diamond, the Granite Mountain, and the Badger.
Although Irish-Americans constitute the largest ethnic group, the Cornish influence in Butte’s development is evident through the sale of Cornish pasties in local shops.
Virtually every cemetery in the mining districts of Cornwall contain memorials to Cornish people who died overseas. Baldhu has several including a good one I photographed a few weeks back of a miner who died in Cuba. During my many years of research I only ever came across one example of a body that was shipped back (in this instance packed in nitrate of soda from the Pacific Littroral) to be interred in Cornwall.
In fact there are a number of large cemeteries around Butte that I visited. All burial grounds in the US tend to have specific sections: for Oddfellows/Freemasons, Catholics, Fire Fighters, Chinese etc. The Cornish tend to be in the Oddfellows/Freemasons bit. The one in Grass Valley CA is huge and full of Cornish people. There are numerous cemeteries in the world that contain large numbers of Cornish memorials that I have visited: Kadina, Burra and Moonta (in Australia), Coquimbo (Chile) and Real del Monte in Mexico.
Den heb davaz a gollaz i dir