{"id":3567,"featured":0,"modified":"2026-04-17 19:58:11","latitude":46.01595709566729652806316153146326541900634765625,"longitude":-112.55124159157276153564453125,"title":"Reno Sales Residence","subtitle":"","fullsize":"https://storyofbutte.org/files/fullsize/abb07d9cc9ceb01431f6bdf063e3968b.jpg","address":"","all_locations":[],"zoom":19,"creator":["Fred Quivik"],"description":"A native of Iowa, Sales had moved with his family to the Gallatin Valley as a boy. He graduated from Montana State College in Bozeman in 1898 with a degree in mining engineering. Two years later, he graduated from Columbia University’s School of mines with another degree in mining engineering. He immediately moved to Butte and took a job in the Boston & Montana’s engineering department. In 1901, the B&M was acquired by Amalgamated, and Sales accepted a position as assistant mining engineer in Amalgamated’s Geological Department. That organization had got its start in 1897 when Marcus Daly hired Canadian-born mining engineer David W. Brunton to work in ACM’s mines.
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\r\nWhen Daly hired Brunton, ACM’s mines were growing in depth and production, and the complexity of ACM operation needed engineering expertise. The famous litigation over mining rights on the Butte hill was also getting underway. Brunton recognized that he needed the expertise of a trained geologist to help him to better organize the company’s mining operations and to defend the company’s mining rights in court. Brunton hired Horace V. Winchell who, like Brunton, had received his college education at the University of Michigan. Winchell was the person who organized ACM’s geological efforts into a Geological Department and, together with Brunton, innovated ACM’s system of mapping the underground. Meanwhile, about the time Sales joined, ACM’s Geological Department expanded to be Amalgamated’s Geological Department. Winchell and Sales played key roles in discovering Heinze’s violations of Amalgamated’s mining rights in Butte’s underground mine workings. When Winchell left Butte in 1906, shortly after Amalgamated’s conflicts with Heinze were resolved, Sales was appointed chief geologist at the Geological Department. And after all Amalgamated’s Butte operations were consolidated into ACM in 1910, Sales became chief geologist of ACM’s Geological Department. In 1914, all ACM’s mining engineering was placed under the direction of Sales’ Geological Department. He populated his staff mainly with mining engineers, reasoning that the basic training a mining engineer received in geology was sufficient, and the most important task of his department had was the efficient engineering of the underground workings. His department also trained young engineers in the “Anaconda System” in the Butte mines to prepare them for assignments at ACM’s other properties in the U.S. and elsewhere.
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\r\nDuring Sales first decade in Butte, he lived in such rented accommodations as the Lenox on West Granite, the Beresford across Quartz from the old Quartz Street Fire Station (today’s Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives), and the Leonard on West Granite. He built his house at 954 Caledonia in 1910.","sponsor":null,"accessinfo":"","lede":"Reno Sales was a mining engineer who is widely credited with building ACM’s Geological Department into an organization of world renown for integrating the exploration, development, and operation of a large group of underground mines such as those found beneath the Butte hill.","website":"","related_resources":[],"factoids":[],"files":{"https://storyofbutte.org/files/fullsize/abb07d9cc9ceb01431f6bdf063e3968b.jpg":{"id":5905,"mime-type":"image/jpeg","title":"Reno Sales Residence, 954 Caledonia","description":"The Sales residence is a stately but unornamented two-story, four-square, hipped-roof house in the Shingle Style. | Fred Quivik, July 2025","thumbnail":"https://storyofbutte.org/files/square_thumbnails/abb07d9cc9ceb01431f6bdf063e3968b.jpg"}}}