The Smelter and the Town Called Smeltertown
Near Salida, Colorado
Just west of downtown Salida stands a lone brick smokestack, tall and slender against the sky, the last survivor of an industry that once roared here. In the year nineteen oh two, the Ohio and Colorado Smelting and Refining Company built a large smelter on about eighty acres of ground on the edge of town. A smelter is a plant that melts raw ore in enormous furnaces to separate out the valuable metal.
This one processed on average a thousand tons of ore every single day, drawing in silver, gold, copper, and lead from mines across the region. Building the plant and running it took around three hundred men, and a whole neighborhood grew up around the works to house them. The company tried to name it Kortz, after a company president, but the name never stuck, and people called it Smeltertown, a name still used today.
The great smokestack you see was built in the year nineteen seventeen and rose about three hundred sixty five feet, put up in under five months using more than two hundred railcar loads of brick. A fire in nineteen nineteen, mounting debt, and hard economic times shut the plant down around nineteen twenty. The smokestack still stands, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, a lonely monument to the fire and smoke that once fed this town.
