For seventy-four years, the people of Butte had a pleasure ground of their own at the foot of the East Ridge, a short streetcar ride east of the city. The Columbia Gardens opened to the public on June 4, 1899, and it closed for the last time on Labor Day, September 3, 1973. During those years it was the only major amusement park in Montana, and admission was always free. Generations of Butte children measured their summers by its flower beds, its dance pavilion, and its rides.
The park's story began with William A. Clark, one of the Copper Kings who fought for control of Butte's copper industry. An earlier, smaller park of the same name had operated from 1888 in Horse Canyon, but poor streetcar service doomed it. In March 1899 Clark purchased the property, and he directed Jesse R. Wharton, the manager of his Butte Electric Railway Company, to find a better site near the trolley lines. Wharton chose the east end of St. Ann Street, where Clark bought twenty-one acres. The park grew steadily, reaching sixty-eight acres by 1925.
Clark built the Gardens generously, as a place where families could escape the smoke and dust of the mines. Visitors found playgrounds and picnic grounds, formal flower gardens and greenhouses, a grand pavilion with a large dance floor, and a lake used for swimming and boating. A zoo displayed Montana wildlife, and the grounds hosted concerts, baseball, and community celebrations. Clark once said, in a remark recorded by the Montana Historical Society, "The Columbia Gardens is my monument. Of my many business enterprises it is the one I love best, and it is practically the only one on which I lose money."
The rides became the park's greatest attractions. In 1906 the Gardens added a wooden roller coaster built in a figure-eight pattern, a gravity-fed coaster that was still carrying riders in the park's final seasons. A carousel built by the Allan Herschell Company followed in 1928, along with a biplane ride. In 1901 Wharton began an Arbor Day observance that gave children a free ride, a free lunch, and a tree to plant. Clark also established Children's Day, held on Thursdays through the summer, when children sixteen and younger rode the streetcar to the Gardens free of charge. The Anaconda Company kept the tradition alive after buses replaced the trolleys in the late 1930s, and the final Children's Day was held on August 30, 1973.
Clark died in 1925, and in 1928 his heirs sold the Gardens, the streetcar system, and other Butte properties to the Anaconda Company. The company maintained the park for forty-five years and kept admission free, even as its expanding open-pit mines crept ever closer to the park's grounds. In early 1973 the Anaconda Company announced that the coming season would be the park's last, so that the ground could be taken into the expanding pit.
A Save the Gardens committee resisted the decision, but the company did not relent. Thousands came on the last day, Labor Day 1973, and the rides were then stored in the arcade of the grand pavilion while residents explored moving them to a new site. That hope ended on November 12, 1973, when a fire destroyed the arcade and the stored rides, including the carved horses of the carousel. Investigators blamed an overloaded electrical transformer, although power to the site had been shut off two months earlier, and many residents have questioned that explanation ever since. The former park site was afterward consumed by open-pit mining.
The Gardens themselves are gone, but Butte has refused to let the memory go with them. Montana PBS told the park's story in the 1999 documentary Remembering the Columbia Gardens. Local volunteers organized in 1996 to build a new carousel in the old one's spirit, carving and painting its horses by hand. The Spirit of Columbia Gardens Carousel opened in Stodden Park on July 27, 2018, with thirty-two hand-carved horses. For a city that lost its gardens to the pit, the turning carousel is a fitting memorial to Clark's gift, a place made for Butte's children.