Butte’s second deadliest mine disaster

Pennsylvania Mine on southeast flank of the Butte Hill, about 1900.
The headframe is enclosed in the large building at center.
The east end of Park Street is just beyond the long building (ore bin) at right center.

By Richard I. Gibson

Twenty-one men were killed February 14, 1916, in a fire at the Pennsylvania Mine. The Pennsylvania stood at the eastern ends of Broadway and Park Streets, where Parrot Street intersected. That location is within the Berkeley Pit today, about 1,000 feet directly in front of the viewing stand on the rim, as you look across the pit.

In 1916 the Pennsylvania was one of the major mines, with at least 41 separate structures on the site, ranging from an ice house to the two-story, 40-foot-long change house or dry. The mine was established by 1887 by “Sheriff Lloyd, his brother, and the Harris boys” (Butte Miner, Nov. 28, 1888) and sold in early 1888 to the Boston & Montana Company, with the Lewisohn Brothers of New York among the principals. By 1899, the B & M was part of the Amalgamated (Anaconda) and the stage was set for one of the main battles in the War of the Copper Kings.

Amalgamated owed the Pennsylvania and the nearby Michael Davitt, but Augustus Heinze controlled the Rarus, immediately to the northeast. On December 28, 1899, Judge Clancy had decided the Pennsylvania vein was owned by Heinze’s Montana Ore Purchasing Company, setting up additional lawsuits. Ultimately, the Pennsylvania became the scene of some of the actual underground warfare as well as legal wrangling, until 1906 when most of Heinze’s properties were acquired by the Anaconda. See The Battle for Butte for more of this story.

click to enlarge

On February 14, 1916, 220 men were in the Pennsylvania Mine when the fire broke out, probably on the 1200 level near a ventilating fan at an air-shaft station, at about 9:00 p.m. The ultimate cause was never known with certainty. It might have started from an abandoned miner’s candle, or from an electrical short. 195 men were hoisted from the mine within 30 minutes. Five others escaped through the Tramway Mine, whose shaft was nearly a half-mile from the Pennsylvania, and one got out through the Mountain View. Nineteen men were unaccounted for, and were later found suffocated on the 300 level. Two rescuers, wearing Draeger breathing apparatus, also died, probably because the devices were insufficiently charged with oxygen.

The fire was not fully extinguished until April 5. Concrete bulkheads were constructed to protect interconnected mines from the smoke, and extensive mining work was necessary to control the blaze.

Draeger breathing apparatus

Following the Pennsylvania Mine disaster, the Anaconda Company instituted many safety improvements, including installing 2-inch sprinkler lines on all shaft collars, and establishing a new “all out of the mine” signal—nine flashes of all lights, repeated three times, followed by the signal for the level where the danger was located.

Resources: The Battle For Butte, by Michael Malone (U. of Washington Press, 2006, especially pages 144, 168, 172, 179-81); The Underground Battle of the Miners, by C.P. Connolly, McClure’s Magazine, May 1907; The Pennsylvania Mine Fire Butte, Mont., by C.E. Nighman and R.S. Foster, Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers, vol. 57, 1918 (source of underground mine map). Nighman was the Fireboss and Foster was the Safety Engineer for the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. Photo of miner with Draeger apparatus at a Pennsylvania coal mine, from Library of Congress, Lewis Hine, photographer, January 1911. Surface photo from A Brief History of Butte, by Harry Freeman, 1900. Post-card view circa 1905.

Dr. Donald Campbell of West Broadway Street

By Richard I. Gibson

Donald Campbell was born the sixth of ten children November 1, 1862, at Marble Mountain, Inverness County, Nova Scotia, in western Cape Breton Island on the shores of Bras d’Or Lake. His parents were from Inverness and Southerland shires, Scotland, but had been in Nova Scotia since their infancy. In 1883 he emigrated to the U.S., to Massachusetts, where he worked in mental hospitals. He obtained his medical degree from the University of Vermont (Burlington) in 1891.

Young Doctor Campbell came to Butte, penniless, in the spring of 1892, quickly rising to prominence not only in Butte but throughout the west. By 1896 he was a state representative to the American Medical Association. He was elected Recording Secretary of the Rocky Mountain Interstate Medical Association in 1899, and likely was instrumental in bringing that group to Butte for its second annual conference, August 28-29, 1900. He seems to have accepted the office in the RMIMA reluctantly but with good humor, saying “I believe I owe the Association my thanks for electing me to this office but I think it was done more to get even with me than anything else and some time I shall get even with the man who suggested my name.”

Murray Hospital at Quartz and Alaska (parking lot today)

Campbell was a founder of the Silver Bow Medical Association and served as its vice president in 1900-01. He maintained his office in his home at 307 West Broadway, an ornate house in a section called the Mediterranean Block. The core of that house dates to before 1884, when it was a small, T-shaped one-story home. Campbell expanded it in 1896, adding the second floor and some of the embellishment, although much of the present Spanish Revival appearance dates to a second major remodeling in 1916.

Dr. Campbell became the personal physician to copper king F. A. Heinze sometime in the late 1890s, a position that undoubtedly contributed to his fame and fortune. He was also the local physician and surgeon to the Northern Pacific Railway. By 1905, he no longer maintained an office in his home, as he had become an officer, and eventually President, of the Murray Hospital (at Quartz and Alaska Streets). See also these posts on the Murray Hospital and Dr. Murray.

307 W. Broadway, part of the "Mediterranean Block"

He married fellow Nova Scotian Jessie F. Jeffreys at Hunter's Hot Springs, Bozeman, in 1893. Campbell died February 5, 1925, and is buried in Mt. Moriah Cemetery. Jessie lived until 1943. Today, his home is occupied by another member of the medical profession—a dentist.

Sources: Sanborn maps, Progressive Men of Montana, Find a Grave, Proceedings of the RMIMA, Western Resources June 1901: Butte, Montana at the dawn of the twentieth century. Images: Dr. Campbell’s portrait from Western Resources (1901), Montana Memory Project, scan by Butte Public Library; Murray Hospital from an old postcard; modern photo of 307 W. Broadway by Dick Gibson.