Orphan Girl Mine

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The following is from the Montana DEQ mine narratives; please edit, expand, and improve it.

The Orphan Girl mine site has been developed as the World Mining Museum. Thousands of mining artefacts surround the mine as part of the Museum's extensive collections. Today, the mine remains consist of four features: a headframe, a relocated steam hoist, a hoist house and a railroad. The mine shaft is 3,000 feet deep and has a concrete bulkhead near the surface supported by a wooden frame.

The Orphan Girl mine was a major silver and zinc producer in Butte from the late 1880s until 1956 when it was finally closed by the ACM Co. The mine derived its name from its isolation from the other major mining properties in Butte. On September 13, 1879, Charles X. Larabie, Demos McFarland, Salton Cameron and Marcus Daly patented the Orphan Girl lode. Before 1896 the Moffat Brothers took $200,000 from the property. The gold/silver ore was taken to the Colorado Smelter where it returned $18 per ton. In 1916 the mine was acquired by the ACM Co. and a rich vein of zinc/silver/lead ore was discovered. However, the mine was allowed to fill with water during a lengthy legal dispute with the Daly Estate over mine ownership. In the early 1920s, ACM was finally able to pump out the underground and set to sinking the shaft to the 1,700-foot level. In 1925, ACM connected the Orphan Girl underground to the mile-distant Anselmo mine by way of a tunnel. ACM also upgraded the mine by relocating the steel headframe from the Colorado mine and the electric hoist from the Hibernia (Chaleen et al. 1981)

Between 1925 and 1933, the Orphan Girl again remained idle. ACM was pulling all the zinc ore it needed out of their Elm Orlu mine. The Orphan Girl’s 200 million tons of zinc ore were held in reserve for when the Elm Orlu played out. In 1933 the hoisting engine began pulling rich silver/zinc ore to the surface. ACM upgraded the Orphan Girl headframe and hoist in 1940 when it and the Elm Orlu were Montana’s two leading zinc producers. The mine was Montana’s largest producer of zinc from 1950 to 1956 (Ingalls 1931; Shea 1940).

By 1944, the Orphan Girl had produced over seven million ounces of silver, not Butte's richest silver mine, but a steady producer with a reputation for its comfortable working environment. The waste rock dump, located just west of the Orphan Girl, was built between the 1920s and 1956; this makes it one of the most recent hard rock mine dumps on the Butte hill. The Orphan Girl continued to produce zinc ore for ACM until 1956, when the company permanently retired the working operations. A group of local citizens interested in preserving a part of Butte's rich mining history opened the World Museum of Mining on the Orphan Girl site in 1964, incorporating the hoist house and head frame into the museum complex (Chaleen et al. 1981).

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