Carousel horse sells ‘at the last minute’

By Holly Michels of The Montana Standard - 03/25/2008

Glory, a wood carousel horse put up for an online auction as a fundraising effort by The Spirit of Columbia Gardens Carousel, sold “at the last minute” for $10,000 — the minimum bid. The carousel project hoped to earn $25,000 to $30,000 from the auction.

“We don’t know all the details,” George Parrett, president of the organization, said Monday night after the eBay auction ended. “But the horse sold with about a minute left in the deadline.” But the eBay Web site shows the bid didn’t quite come down to the wire. A person using the screen name “anacondahoolie” put up the only bid, of $10,000, at 5:44 p.m., 34 minutes before the 6:18 deadline.

The site also shows “anacondahoolie” has been a registered eBay user since March 17, but doesn’t provide any information on who the person is.

The Spirit of Columbia Gardens Carousel plans to use the money to help rebuild the carousel that ran at the original Columbia Gardens, an amusement park on Butte’s East Side erected by Copper King William Clark in the late 1800s. The first carousel burned in the 1970s and the park was dismantled in 1973 to make way for expanding mine operations.

With a 13-person board and a small pool of volunteers contributing hundreds of thousands of hours, the project is nearing completion.

Twenty-seven of 33 horses are finished. The project, which started several years ago, has been being held up over a dispute about the site of the carousel. The group plans to place the attraction at the base of the proposed Lady of the Rockies Tram, but that endeavor is held up in the Montana Supreme Court over a road dispute. Our Lady of the Rockies wants to use State Street to ferry tourists to a proposed tram, which will take them to the statue of the Virgin Mary, atop the East Ridge, but property owners along the road contend it is private.