P a g e 6 G h o s t T o w n s a n d H i s t o r y o f M o n t a n a N e w s l e t t e r Prospectors the Porter brothers, Dennis Leary and George W. Newkirk built the house and outbuildings in 1866. Their living quarters was the taller building at left, beyond the corral. Behind the house (to the right) stood their blacksmith shop; next to the right was a horse stable. They kept milk cows in the shed at right front. The view here looks west, so Quartz Street would be along the left side of the image. The men established the Parrot claims with Joseph Ramsdell and built a small smelter (likely Butte’s first) on the lower reaches of Town Gulch (Dublin Gulch) not far from this house. They could not make the fire hot enough to get molten metal to flow, so the smelter failed. They tried again on Parrot Gulch, right below the mine, employing a windmill fan to create a draft in a crude blast furnace, using an 8-horsepower threshing machine as the driving source for the fan. That one failed as well. The Parrot and Ramsdell Parrot Mines would go on to become important excavations, both more than 1,000 feet deep, and other smelters would succeed. The partners sold the buildings in 1869, to become the core of the Girton House, an early hotel. This makes it easy to determine the precise location for this first house in Butte: East Quartz, between Main and Wyoming, on the north side of the street, just east of the alley that runs north to Copper Street. A parking lot today. In 1884, the Girton House (#17 in Bird's-Eye view at left, and including the two-story building above the word "Quartz") was just west of one of the early Miner’s Union Halls, which stood on the northwest corner of Quartz and Wyoming. The building survived in 1891, as the Cotter House, successor to the Girton, but by 1897 the space was covered by waste rock from the Gold Hill mine, whose shaft stood just to the north, below the intersection of Pennsylvania and Copper Streets. There has not been a building on this spot since before 1897. –Richard Gibson Sources: Butte Bystander, April 15, 1897, The Story of Butte; Sanborn maps. Richard Gibson is a geologist. His career has ranged from analyzing kidney stones to 35 years in oil exploration. Butte's history, architecture, and people captured his interest like he thought nothing could, and have expanded his life significantly. He’s still passionate about geology, but now he’s passionate about Butte, too. His book "What Things Are Made Of" came out in March 2011; his writing blog focuses on it. The Butte History blog contains interesting stories discovered in Butte, Montana, which are documented in "Lost Butte, Montana," from The History Press. Check out more great stories from Richard by visiting his sites: http://buttehistory.blogspot.com/ http://butte-anacondanhld.blogspot.com/ https://www.verdigrisproject.org/butte-americas-story
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