Simple four-room worker cottages like this one provided basic accommodations for miners. This well-preserved example, built circa 1890, retains its original footprint, wood windows and doors, and lapped wood siding. It originally included two bedrooms, a living room, a kitchen, and an outhouse near the alley. Life for miners was often rough. John B. Kelly, in residence from 1898 to 1900, was badly beaten and left for dead following a night of drinking in September 1898. John’s friends found him alive in a prospect hole with serious head injuries and a fractured collar bone. In 1902, miner Michael Reed, his wife Mary, and their two children moved here. The Reeds had three more children and, in 1912, were hosting two boarders when Michael died of tuberculosis. Then, in 1914, Mary died of diabetes. Initially, Michael’s sister Mary Casey cared for the children and rented this house to other miners. By the mid-1920s she and the Reed children had returned to live here and at No. 12 next door. The oldest sibling, Thomas Reed and his wife Agnes, lived here from 1934 to 1971.

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George and Elizabeth Clark, immigrants from Cornwall, England, lived in this hipped-roof cottage for thirty years. George arrived in Butte in 1875, while Elizabeth and their three children followed in 1879. By 1890, the Clarks had settled in Centerville, within walking distance of the Mountain Consolidated Mine where George worked. The family watched Centerville grow from a scattered array of log cabins along muddy pathways into a bustling community of respectable one-story, frame houses, inhabited mostly by Cornish and Irish immigrants. This house was built in 1895, and the Clarks moved here in 1900. By then, George and his sons George, Jr., Albert, and William were all working in nearby mines and Elizabeth was a homemaker. George was well known in the mining community and at the end of his career he was the watchman at the Steward Mine from 1926 to 1930. Miner Alfred Temby, wife Mildred, and two children lived here in the 1930s. In 1941, the Tembys divorced, and by 1945 miner Charles Carlson and his wife Grace moved here. Members of the Carlson family remained in residence until 1992.

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Among the oldest survivors in the neighborhood, this four-room shotgun house was built between 1888 and 1890. That year, Butte boasted almost 11,000 people and over eighty operating mines. Mining refuse dumps separated the home from the Gagnon Hoisting Works, Clark’s Original Hoisting Works, and an extensive tram and rail network that hauled the ore to nearby smelters. By 1900, the Gagnon and Original works ran day and night; the roar of the steam engines and rattle of ore cars made it impossible for this home’s residents to forget Butte’s reason for being. A short walk down the hill led to busy Granite Street and the city's commercial and governmental center. The house’s proximity to mines and businesses reflected the intricate interconnection of Butte’s industrial, residential, and commercial zones. Widow Ellen Burns, who lived here from 1923 until her death at age sixty in 1931, surely appreciated the home’s proximity to Granite Street, where she worked as a “janitress” at the Butte Water Works. She shared the small residence, valued at $1,200 in 1930, with her miner brother, Dennis Leary.

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A row of small one-story dwellings occupied the west half of this block in 1884. By 1900, the James McBride family was in residence. Like most of his immediate neighbors, James was a miner born in Ireland. He and his wife Margaret—a native of Kerry, Ireland—had four children. By 1910, mining had taken its toll leaving Margaret a widow. The family took in boarders and, like many miners’ widows, Margaret worked as a laundress and ironer to support her family. By 1920, she owned the property. After Margaret’s death in 1948, extended family continued housekeeping here into the 1950s. Despite its small size, the frame cottage housed numerous family members on the first floor, in the daylight basement, and in a tiny cabin that once stood at the rear. The unfinished attic also likely served as sleeping space. Although the neighborhood is now much more sparsely populated, the steel headframe towering behind West Copper Street is a sober reminder of the industry that bound its first residents together.

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Approximately 77 percent of Centerville’s male residents worked in the mines, and William Berryman, who owned this one-story, wood-frame, hipped-roof cottage, was no exception. One of the more common house types in Centerville, these four-square homes cost about $750 to build in 1900. An English (undoubtedly Cornish) miner, William Berryman arrived in the United States in 1879 at age 17. Mary emigrated from England three years later at age 14. The two married in 1890 and purchased the land on which to build this house in 1897. The Berrymans still lived here in 1910, along with their 19-year-old daughter Anne, a music teacher. Centerville’s substantial Cornish population attracted families like the Berrymans. These working-class emigrants from Cornwall socialized together at the Hall of the Order of St. George and worshipped together at Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church, both an easy walk from the Berrymans’. Though its architecture speaks more to utility than ethnicity, the Berryman cottage stands as a reminder of all the Cornish mining families who made Centerville their home.

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Joseph Walker, president of the Alice Gold and Silver Mine, platted the streets near his mine to provide convenient housing for mine workers. However, when he sold the lots, he kept the mineral rights. By separating mineral rights from property rights, the mining company retained permission to tunnel beneath area homes, a fact that deterred home owners from investing heavily in their houses. By 1891, a shotgun house stood here, part of a crowded residential block. Saloonkeeper John French purchased the property in 1892, which soon accommodated a one-story hipped-roof cottage. A second small home and an outbuilding with an attached chicken coop stood behind the main house. By 1910, French had left the saloon business to deliver coal and wood by wagon. He and his wife Cassie occupied the front house while brothers Dan and James Caddigan, both miners, lived in the back house. After John died in 1912, Cassie remained in residence until 1921, when she sold the property to Ursulla Hawthorn. During the 1960s, as part of “urban renewal,” the city demolished the rear house and outbuildings.

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Beveled lap siding, turned porch supports, and a spindle frieze decorate this functional, working-class residence, built circa 1896. The hipped-roof cottage was home to the Kelly family for over seventy years. Irish miner Cornelius Kelly and his wife Julia owned the home free of mortgage by 1900, but Cornelius did not have long to enjoy his piece of the American dream. He died in 1907 of chronic bronchitis. Caused in large part by breathing the quartz dust produced by drilling and end-of-shift explosions, lung diseases were an occupational hazard. Historians estimate that lung diseases killed between a third and a half of Butte’s hard rock miners. In 1910 widow Julia supported herself and her children—Jerry 13, Michael 12, and Virginia 11—by providing room and board for her brother and brother-in-law. By 1920, “Verge” worked as a stenographer and both Michael and Jerry had become miners. All three lived at home. In 1940, the children still lived with their mother, who undoubtedly relied on their incomes. Jerry was the last Kelly in residence; he sold the home in 1971.

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Almost a quarter of the buildings in Walkerville are four-square, hip-roof residences, what housing catalogs called “workingman’s cottages.” Quick and inexpensive to build, they provided homes for Walkerville miners and their families. Roughly a third of those miners emigrated from England, many of them from the copper mining district of Cornwall. James and Edith Burnett lived here by 1910, with their two children and two of James’s older brothers, John and Steven. All three men worked as miners. Their father was originally from Cornwall, but the brothers grew up in Lancashire, where their dad mined iron. John was the first of the brothers to seek his fortune in Butte, leaving England in 1898. James was next, arriving in Butte in 1902, followed by Edith and the children in 1906, and Steven in 1909. It seems that James left the mining life behind as quickly as he could. By 1920, the family had moved to Oakland, California, where James worked as a railroad machinist. By that year, another family of English immigrants occupied the residence: fifty-three year-old miner William Rowe and his wife Martha.

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Tucked into the steep slope of Butte hill, this wonderfully preserved four-square cottage well represents Butte’s working backbone. Real estate mogul Josiah Beck built the modest home in 1885 over the Silver King Lode. Charles Eltinge, its first owner, was a correspondence clerk for W. A. Clark. The Eltinge family was strangely connected to America’s first famous female impersonator, William Julian Dalton, who was a neighbor and chum of Eltinge’s son. The performer took Julian Eltinge as his stage name. By 1916, James and Bridget Shea owned the home. Widowed during the influenza epidemic of 1918, Bridget raised four small children working as a waitress. She began a 25-year career in 1930 as business agent for the Women’s Protective Union, likely having experienced this need firsthand. The Shea family owned the house until 1978. Unusual decorative lattice and diamond openings at the porch base add individuality to the standard vernacular design. Original varnished woodwork, French doors, and hardwood floors grace the interior. Bridget’s carefully tended garden of shrub roses, lilacs, and lavender are a fragrant and lasting legacy.

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In 1895, the cabins were replaced by a 300-square-foot gable-roofed house that underwent several additions over time: first a 12-by-12-foot room featuring a bay window, followed by another 12-by-12-foot extension where the front door is now located and a bathroom added to the southeast corner. These expansions contributed to the home’s distinctive roof lines, shaped by both the original structure and its evolving form. The earliest parts of the house were built using square nails and lacked stud framing, with outer walls made of two layers of rough-cut 1x12 boards and interior walls of a single layer; later additions, including the northwest extension and bathroom, transitioned to stud walls and round nails. In the 1930s, Uuno Sahinen and his mother-in-law purchased the house as an investment. Sahinen replaced the wooden foundation with the concrete one still in place and adding a southwest bump-out for stair access to a small basement he excavated himself. The home also holds personal history, as the 1920 census lists Thomas Robbins, a mining electrician, his wife Josephine, and their five children—three daughters and two sons—as residents, adding a human dimension to this enduring piece of Butte’s architectural and social heritage.

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When John Harrington sold this lot in 1888, he reserved the right to mine within twenty feet of the surface—without reinforcing his mine with timbers. Understandably, the purchasers, miner Con Ambrose and his wife Sarah, built a functional, no-frills gable-front-and-wing residence. Deeds like this one provided a disincentive to invest heavily in a home, and for good reason. Mining took precedence as the nearby Berkeley Pit—once home to crowded neighborhoods—demonstrates. In 1894, the Ambroses sold the home to Philip Goodwin, circulation manager for the Butte Miner newspaper. Most of the other early owners were miners, many of whom worked at the nearby Parrot Mine. Among them were John Wallace, who lived here in 1910, and Maurice Condon, whose family purchased the residence in 1912. Maurice died in 1925 at age fifty-two of pneumonia, one of the many lung ailments common to miners working amid dynamite, damp, and dust. After his death, his widow, Annie, worked as a clerk and housekeeper. She lived here with her son, also a miner, into the 1930s.

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