With guidance from the board of directors, the Executive Director of Mainstreet Uptown Butte works with businesses and community residents to promote Uptown Butte as an attractive, enjoyable, and safe place to do business, implement small improvement projects, coordinate retail and special events and administer the routine operations of the organization.
Since October 2002, Mainstreet Uptown Butte’s Executive Director has been George Everett, That year Everett successfully nominated Butte to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to be listed as one of America’s Dozen Distinctive Destinations to encourage travelers with an interest in cultural tourism to plan a visit. Since 2003, in his tenure as Executive Director, Everett has helped facilitate the lighting of eight headframes, the planting of nearly 1,200 new street trees, and the painting of more than 40 historical facades in Uptown Butte through Mainstreet’s High Impact Paint Program.
Everett has been responsible for implementing Butte’s Main Street program to take advantage of historic buildings and other resources to stimulate the local economy by creative reuse of the built environment. Everett put into action his long standing belief that Butte has great potential to benefit from the program’s resources and network of experience around the country. Butte has more than 4,000 historic buildings in its historic zone, possibly more structures than any other national historic landmark district in the country.
In 2007, Everett coordinated the successful effort to have Butte host the National Folk Festival in 2008-2010. As a result, in 2010, Butte was recognized by the Montana Department of Commerce as the Montana Tourism Community of the Year and the National Folk Festival was recognized as the Tourism Event of the Year for 2009.
Everett continues to lead Mainstreet to develop this cultural and economic touchstone for Butte through the planning and implementation of the successor event, the Montana Folk Festival since 2011. The festival was put on pause in 2020 due to the global pandemic. Plans are now underway to carry this festival forward with future Montana Folk Festivals for years to come when it becomes safe once again to present outdoor music and arts festivals with more than 150,000 attendees.
Based on his experience with the transformative power of the arts as demonstrated by the Montana Folk Festival, Everett has steered Mainstreet Uptown Butte to become more involved with the support of the arts as an engine for positive change. In 2013, with the help and support of an Our Town planning grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, Mainstreet supported an effort to plan, establish and expand the Imagine Butte Resource Center as a community arts center in previously vacant space in one of the Uptown’s oldest and most historic buildings, the Phoenix Block. Future plans for the project include artists studios, a fabrication studio, and expansion of the Foreground Gallery to show the work of Montana artists.
Since 2017, Mainstreet Uptown Butte has also guided the resonance of the arts related to the Montana Folk Festival by nurturing the Folk in Schools project to bring traditional performers from the festival to Montana school audiences and to support the Native Youth Art in Action (NYAA) project to bring young Native American visual artists to Butte during the festival to train with mentor master artists and display the results of their efforts.
For more than a decade, Everett has also guided and promoted the Butte Farmers’ Market, with the approach that the market is a source of fresh food but also has served as an engine for commerce and a retail incubator for small businesses. Over the past decade, several small businesses have moved their street setups into historic brick and mortar buildings as a result..
Most recently, Mainstreet met the challenge of adapting the street market to the growing threat of a global pandemic and successfully operated the market during the 2020 season, despite Covid-19.