High on the East Ridge of the Continental Divide above Butte stands a white figure that travelers can see for miles. Our Lady of the Rockies is a ninety-foot statue built in the likeness of Mary, the mother of Jesus, and she looks down on the city from a base that sits 8,510 feet above sea level and roughly 3,000 feet above the streets of Butte. The statue is illuminated at night, and motorists on Interstate 90 and residents throughout the valley have made her a familiar and comforting presence. She is among the tallest statues in the United States, yet her story is not one of government funding or corporate sponsorship. She exists because one Butte family kept a promise and because hundreds of their neighbors helped them keep it.
The story began in 1979, when Butte resident Bob O'Bill learned that his wife, Joyce, was seriously ill with cancer. O'Bill promised that if his wife recovered, he would build a statue of the Virgin Mary in her honor. Joyce O'Bill did recover, and her husband set out to fulfill his vow. His first idea was modest, a small statue of about five feet that could stand in the family yard. When he shared the plan with friends, however, they pointed out that a small figure would never be seen from the city below, and the project grew in ambition until the planned statue stood ninety feet tall on the mountaintop.
Work on the project began on December 29, 1979, and it continued for six years. The statue was built largely with donations of money, materials, and labor from the local community, and no public money paid for it. Guy Ossello donated the land for the site at Saddle Rock on the East Ridge. Laurien Eugene Riehl, a retired engineer, donated his engineering skill to the design, and welder Leroy Lee fabricated the statue with help from Ron Hughes. Volunteers spent summer evenings building the road to the summit, sometimes advancing only a few feet in a day against the mountain rock. The steel figure itself was assembled in sections in Butte, in a lot provided by a local equipment company, while fundraisers across the community paid the bills.
The timing gave the project a deeper meaning for the city. The early 1980s were hard years in Butte, as copper mining contracted and the Berkeley Pit closed in 1982. Families who had depended on the mines for generations faced an uncertain future, and the statue rising above the city became a shared undertaking at a moment when Butte needed one. Miners, electricians, engineers, and homemakers all found a place in the work, and the effort drew support well beyond any single congregation. From the beginning, the finished statue was intended to honor all women, especially mothers, and it was deliberately made nondenominational so that the whole community could claim her.
The conclusion came in the autumn and winter of 1985. In September of that year, crews poured the statue's base with 400 tons of concrete. On December 17, 1985, a National Guard CH-54 helicopter began airlifting the statue in four sections to its foundation on the East Ridge. People in Butte watched from below as the great helicopter carried each piece up the mountain. On December 20, 1985, the final section, the statue's head, was set into place, and the promise made six years earlier stood complete above the city.
Today the statue stands on private land, and visitors reach her on bus tours that depart during the summer months from the Our Lady of the Rockies gift shop in Butte, because private vehicles are not permitted on the summit road. Beside the statue, a memorial wall bears the names of thousands of women who have been remembered there by the people who loved them. For the people of Butte, however, the Lady needs no tour to do her work. She is visible in the morning light and lit against the night sky, a reminder that a promise made in a hospital waiting room became, through volunteer hands, the most recognizable landmark in the Mining City.
Photo: Our Lady of the Rockies, the statue on the ridge above Butte. Photograph by AllAroundTheWest, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.