James R. Hobbins Residence
James R. Hobbins is important in the history of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company for embodying the close relationship between that company and the Montana Power Company.
The link between the two companies was exhibited in 1922 when Hobbins, a senior official with Montana Power, was appointed assistant to ACM president and then, in 1923, named ACM vice president for ACM’s western operations. By then, ACM owned not only mines and smelters in the western U.S. but mining operations in Mexico and Chile, refineries in the Midwest and East, and copper and brass fabricating operations in New England.
J.R. Hobbins was born in 1883 in Madison, Wisconsin, where he attended the University of Wisconsin. After working for a fire-insurance company in Wisconsin for six years, he moved west in 1910, working as a surveyor for an electrical company in California and New Mexico and for a street railway company in Colorado before moving to Great Falls in 1912. He went to work for the Great Falls Power Company before it merged into the Montana Power Company later in 1912. His first job there was as foreman of a construction crew, and he was soon promoted to managing the extension of MPC’s power lines into northern Montana. In 1915, he moved to Butte to work in MPC’s headquarters in charge of the lands and right-of-way department. A year later, he returned to Great Falls after being promoted to position of MPC district manager for northern Montana. In 1922, when ACM appointed him to work as assistant to ACM president C.F. Kelley, Hobbins moved back to Butte, where his office was on the sixth floor of the Hennessy Building. A year later, ACM named him vice president and put him in charge of all ACM operations in Montana. When ACM named Hobbins executive vice president in 1936, he moved to New York City. When Kelley moved from the position of ACM president to chairman of ACM board of directors in 1940, Hobbins was named president of ACM. He served in that capacity until he died in 1949.
When Hobbins and his family moved to Butte in 1922, they first lived at 407 West Broadway, one of the Largey apartments. In 1925, they purchased the residence of William C. Orton, one of the Orton Brothers who owned a musical instrument store in Butte.
Images