Creator: From the Inter Mountain Holiday Edition, 1887-1888, page 5. Source: PAc 946-021, Montana Legacy Collection, Montana Historical Society Research Center Photograph Archives, Helena, MT. Butte Carriage Works and Arion Hall visible. Utility poles visible to the left and center of the view. Date: 1887-1888 West Side of Main Street, from Park Ave looking South Artist's rendering of a street scene with storefronts in the background, horse-drawn carts and pedestrians on the street in the foreground. Source: PAc 946-018, Montana Legacy Collection, Montana Historical Society Research Center Photograph Archives, Helena, MT. Pedestrians and other people visible on boardwalk. Hennessy & Co., Centennial Brewery, First National Bank, Sand & Boyce Dry Goods, Babcock the Hatter, and Kahnweiler's Bazaar. Images West Side of Main Street, from Granite to Broadway Artist's rendering of a street scene with numerous storefronts in the background and horse-drawn carts on the street in the foreground. It is the largest NHL in the West, covering the period 1876-1934 and encompassing nearly 10,000 acres with over 6,000 contributing resources. In 2006, the National Park Service recognized Butte, Anaconda, and Walkerville’s significance to the intertwined histories of mining and labor by declaring the district a National Historic Landmark. Their four-month industry-wide strike in 1934 precipitated the birth of the CIO, an organization that helped rejuvenate the labor movement nationwide. Butte and Anaconda workers reorganized during the New Deal after the federal government guaranteed the right of workers to unionize. Labor unrest and years under martial law followed in Butte, while in Anaconda, the Company fired suspected Socialists and agitators, devastating the unions. Clashes between capitalism and labor marked the district, especially after the 1917 Butte Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine fire, the worst hard-rock mining disaster in the nation’s history. Two of the nation’s most radical unions had their roots in Butte and Walkerville, “The Gibraltar of Unionism.” They were the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World, whose rhetoric opposing “wage slavery” challenged the foundations of American capitalism. Extracting the metal was hazardous work, and the danger bred solidarity among miners and smelterworkers. Looming gallows frames and the towering Anaconda Company smokestack recall the industrial roots of these sister cities, the source of much of that copper. It took millions of miles of copper to build the telegraph, telephone, and electrical lines that transformed the United States from a collection of small, isolated communities to a cohesive, industrialized nation.
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