Drumlummon Institute and Montana Preservation Alliance Publish New Book on the Historic Built Environment of Anaconda and Butte, Montana

Drumlummon Institute and the Montana Preservation Alliance have published a new book entitled "Coming Home: A Special Issue [of the online journal of Montana arts and culture, 'Drumlummon Views'] Devoted to the Historic Built Environment and Landscapes of Butte and Anaconda, Montana." Public historian Patty Dean served as the book's editor.

Helena, Mont. (PRWEB) June 3, 2009 -- Drumlummon Institute and the Montana Preservation Alliance have published a new book entitled "Coming Home: A Special Issue [of the online journal of Montana arts and culture, 'Drumlummon Views'] Devoted to the Historic Built Environment and Landscapes of Butte and Anaconda, Montana." Public historian Patty Dean served as the book's editor.

The publication of "Coming Home," available both online and as a printed book, coincides with the national conference of the Vernacular Architecture Forum held in Butte June 10-13. The conference is entitled "Mining Metropolis: An Island in a Stockman's Paradise under Montana's Big Sky."

"Perhaps the most scrutinized and documented of Montana cities," editor Patty Dean writes, "Butte and Anaconda possess great material and cultural incongruities that continue to intrigue and beguile: natural beauty versus industrial landscape, great wealth versus subsistence and poverty, ornate buildings designed by nationally known architects versus alley hovels, urban density versus the void of the Berkeley Pit."

"Coming Home" sheds fresh light on the industrial and domestic landscapes that make Butte and Anaconda so distinctive. The issue features essays, portfolios, and reprints that make accessible such underutilized/ forgotten historic resources as an early 20th-century newspaper series profiling "queer spots" in and around Butte and Anaconda (e.g. Chinese gardens, the "Assyrian colony" on East Park, the Cree village on the Butte Flats), historic photographs of sanitary conditions in Butte's working class neighborhoods, and a 1907 article on arts and crafts homes in Butte.

In addition, the issue offers new research on the landscape and architecture of Butte and Anaconda as a manifestation of dominance and power, multi-family building forms in Butte, and Butte's iconic mine headframes.

The book also features articles on the Anaconda smelter, the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway, and the Anaconda Saddle Club, a photographic tribute to Butte and Anaconda cemeteries, portfolios by photographer Lisa Wareham and printmaker Joeann Daley, fiction by Anaconda native Ron Fischer, an essay by Butte writer Edwin Dobb, and poems by Anaconda's Dennice Scanlon, and a major essay on "The Industrial Undergirding to the Vernacular Architecture of Butte and Anaconda" by historian Fred Quivik. Former U.S. Congressman Pat Williams has contributed a foreword.

The online version of "Coming Home," free to all, can be accessed at http://www.drumlummon.org. Copies of the printed version of the 408-page book, which retails for $40, are available from bookstores; they can also be ordered directly from Drumlummon Institute's online bookstore, http://drumlummon.org/html/Books-Offprints.html. "Coming Home" is distributed to the trade by Riverbend Publishing of Helena.

"Coming Home" was made possible through the generosity of Humanities Montana, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, together with a National Park Service Preserve America Grant administered through the State Historic Preservation Office, Montana Historical Society. The printed version was made possible through the generous support of the National Park Service Challenge Cost Share Program.

For more information about "Coming Home," contact Drumlummon Institute at 406.461.7494, or the Montana Preservation Alliance at 406.457.2822.

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