Remember This? Columbia Gardens in Butte

Columbia Gardens opened on June 4, 1899, in Butte. Copper King William A. Clark built it, and the trolley company that ran out to it owned it until Anaconda Copper bought Clark’s holdings in 1928, according to Wikipedia. It grew to 68 acres.

The Gardens never charged admission. The idea was that the trolley fares paid for it, and Anaconda kept the gate free even after buses replaced the trolley in 1937. Every summer Thursday from 1903 on was Children’s Day, when kids 16 and under rode out free.

What people bring up first:

• The roller coaster. Wooden and gravity-fed, put in in 1906. It started as a three-level Figure 8, dropped to two levels after a 1917 accident, and Anaconda redid the layout in 1929.
• The carousel. An Allan Herschell machine installed in 1928.
• The tandem swings. Kids tried to “crack” them by swinging as high as they would go.
• The pavilion. Concessions downstairs and a ballroom that hosted proms and Big Band acts.

By the early 1970s the Berkeley Pit was creeping up on the north side of the park. Anaconda announced that 1973 would be the last season. The final Children’s Day was Thursday, August 30, 1973, and the park closed on Labor Day, September 3. The Montana Standard looked back in 2023 and wrote that hundreds of people piled into their cars that weekend to go one more time.

The rides were put away for winter, mostly in the pavilion arcade. On November 12, 1973, the place burned. The official report blamed an overloaded transformer, though the power had been shut off two months earlier, and plenty of Butte people have their own theory. The Continental Pit later took the site.

Some of the tandem swings went to city parks. In 2018 a nonprofit opened the Spirit of Columbia Gardens Carousel, built mostly with donated labor and materials.

Remember this place? Tell us what you remember.