With 34 rooms, a sixty-four-foot ballroom, a billiard room, a chapel, a library and nine fireplaces, the
Copper King Mansion was a fitting home for a man who had amassed a $50 million (in 1900 dollars) by the late nineteenth century. Built in the Romanesque Revival Victorian architectural style, absolutely no expense was spared in its construction, with many varieties of wood used to finish interior rooms, Tiffany glass, frescoed ceilings, imported tile and hand carved mantles over each fireplace. The stairway, also hand carved, required four years of painstaking labor to complete. Built between 1884 and 1888, the red-brick Victorian mansion is one of the grandest ever built in the state.
Since 1953 the house has been operated as a
Bed & Breakfast. Guided tours are also available through the summer.
One of a series of 75 retrospectives on the historic buildings of Butte, this is a short article, number 73 in the series, on the Copper King Mansion.
Butte in 75, No. 73: Over-the-top mansion shows Clark’s status as ‘Copper King’
Jul 8, 2014
One of the most recognizable icons of Butte is the exterior of the Copper King Mansion, 219 W. Granite. Famed copper baron William A. Clark built the 34-room mansion for his family over four years: 1884 to 1888. The “over-the-top’’ Elizabethan-style architecture transitioned between Gothic and Renaissance-era designs, said Butte architect Mark Reavis.
“If you were somebody of that importance, you’d pick up that style,’’ said Reavis. “It’s got verticality to it, but also horizontal elements. You can see the clearly defined floor level.’’
It cost Clark $260,000 to build — a thousand times more than what it cost to build a worker’s cottage during the same era, Reavis said.
From the Montana Standard