Copper King Mansion

Copper King Mansion is the house a half-day's income built. W.A. Clark — one of Butte's three Copper Kings, worth somewhere between $50 and $200 million in a town on 'the richest hill on earth' — spent $250,000 on the 34-room Romanesque pile on West Granite Street, 1884 to 1888, the imported woodwork and frescoed ceilings amounting to roughly twelve hours of his take. He'd come to Montana in 1863 with a wagon and a loan business; by the time the mansion rose he owned mines, smelters, newspapers, railroads, and the water company.

Clark's real palace was the Fifth Avenue mansion he built later across from Central Park — the Butte house was the boomtown base, the place where the senator who'd bought his seat entertained the associates. The Cote family bought it in 1953 and still lives in it, running the bed-and-breakfast through rooms that never left 1888 — the gas-and-electric chandeliers, the hand-carved wood, the frescoes the copper paid for.

The haunting is the mansion's gentle register — the hazy apparition in the basement and first-floor hall, the cold presence in the game room, the doors that open themselves, the attic trunk that unlocked itself once. The file keeps the house's true anomaly: a robber baron's mansion that stayed in one family for seventy years, still furnished with the copper king's own things, still sheltering guests under the ceilings his money bought.

Copper King Mansion is the archive's Copper King file — W.A. Clark's 1888 Romanesque mansion on the richest hill on earth, still owned by the family that bought it in 1953, its ghost as gentle as the fortune that built it was vast.