McGlone Heights
As ACM embarked on the Greater Butte Project in 1947, which led to sinking the Kelley shaft and developing a block-cave operation to extract greater volumes of low-grade ore from underground workings, the company also began real estate developments in Butte to enhance the housing available for miners and their families.
The work was undertaken by Kenwood Realty Company, an ACM subsidiary with offices in the Tuttle Block, in cooperation with the Butte Development Association (BDA). The first projects were the construction of dozens of houses on the Flat in the Grand Avenue Addition and the Development Addition.
Construction of the 125 houses in McGlone Heights, in the northwest part of Butte, north of Lexington Street and along both sides of North Excelsior, employed partially prefabricated structures made by Farwest Homes, which had a factory at Chehalis, WA, south of Olympia. Farwest Homes was a company started by Willard A. Wollander, a native of Minnesota. He had attended college, but he had no formal training in architecture. In 1940, at age 34, Wollander and his family moved to Olympia, where he started a lumber yard and building-supply business. He soon started contracting and marketing house designs. He moved to Tacoma in 1948 to expand his business. About the same time, he started a business making prefabricated houses, establishing a factory in Chehalis and selling his structures along the Pacific Coast and as far east as Ohio. Contractors working on houses in McGlone Heights were able to place three foundations each day and complete several houses each week. The houses in the Development Addition were also prefabricated by Farwest Homes. Kenwood Realty sold many of the houses as soon as they were completed, and it retained others as rental property.
McGlone Heights was named for Edward S. McGlone in August 1952 at a dinner given in his honor on the occasion of his being named executive vice president of ACM. Born in Nebraska in 1899, McGlone graduated from the Colorado School of Mines in 1923, after which he moved to Butte to work for the Davis-Daly Mining Company. When ACM bought that company in 1924, he went to work as a mucker in the Tramway mine, progressing to sampler, shift boss, and foreman. From there, he moved up to general superintendent of mines, vice president of western operations in 1946, and executive vice president in 1952. During his time in charge of ACM’s western operations, he oversaw the launching of the Greater Butte Project and the conversion of the Thornton Hotel into the ACM Employees Club. He retired from ACM in 1968 and moved to Florida. McGlone, who died in 1973, was inducted into the Colorado Sports Hall of Fame posthumously in 1977; he was said to have been the “greatest football player ever to represent the Colorado School of Mines.”
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