Anaconda, Montana: the smelter city

In 1883 Marcus Daly had a problem most mining men would envy. His Anaconda mine in Butte was turning out copper ore faster than anyone could smelt it. Backed by the San Francisco syndicate of George Hearst, James Ben Ali Haggin and Lloyd Tevis, he went looking for a smelter site with plenty of water, and found it in the Deer Lodge Valley along Warm Springs Creek.

On June 25, 1883, Daly filed a town plat. He wanted to call the place Copperopolis, but another Montana camp already had that name, so the town took the name of the mine. Smelter construction started that summer, and people arrived faster than houses could go up.

The first plant, later called the Upper Works, went into operation in 1884 with five times the capacity of any smelter in Butte. A second, the Lower Works, followed in 1889. Together they made Anaconda the largest smelting center in the world, and the town grew up in their smoke.

The jobs drew immigrants by the thousands. Many were Irish, like Daly himself; others came from all over Europe. Most settled in Goosetown, a working-class neighborhood beside the foundry and the old works, close enough to walk to every shift.

By the late 1890s the Upper and Lower Works were worn out and too small for the flood of Butte ore. Daly began an immense new plant on the hill across the valley from town. In 1899 he sold his company into the Amalgamated Copper trust for $39 million, and in November 1900 he died in New York. The Washoe Reduction Works was finished in 1902, and the old works on Warm Springs Creek shut down.

The ore came from Butte on the Butte, Anaconda & Pacific Railway, which Daly had founded in 1891 so that no outside railroad could set his freight rates. At the Washoe it was crushed and concentrated, roasted, melted down to a copper-iron matte, and blown in converters until what poured out was blister copper, ready for the refinery.

The plant opened with a capacity of 4,800 tons of ore a day. At its wartime peak in the 1940s it handled 15,000 tons a day, and the company's foundry and machine shops filled the flats below the hill. People called it the Washoe, the smelter, or just "the works."

Work began on May 23, 1918. The Alphons Custodis Chimney Construction Company of New York, which specialized in tall brick chimneys, topped it out on November 30, nineteen days after the armistice ended the First World War.

The stack stands on a concrete foundation 30 feet tall on its downhill side. The brick chimney above rises 555 feet, about six inches taller than the Washington Monument. Its flue is 76 feet across at the bottom and 60 feet across at the top. It took 2,464,652 perforated tile bricks and weighs 23,810 tons.

The bricks were made locally: perforated tile bricks, most of them curved to fit the round wall, each about 2.7 times the size of an ordinary brick. When new, the red brick chimney was covered with a gray terra cotta coating. By the time the smelter closed, the coating had worn off the lower part, exposing the brick and the steel bands that ring the stack. What survives on the upper 40 percent has weathered far darker than the brick, which is why the top of the stack looks black from town.

It went into service on May 5, 1919, drawing the smoke of the whole works up through the flues and the electrical dust treaters at its foot. It was then the tallest masonry structure in the world. Today it is the tallest one still standing anywhere.