Anaconda: Marcus Daly's Copper Empire

If you look west from Interstate Fifteen near Anaconda, you may catch sight of a brick chimney rising five hundred and eighty-five feet from the valley floor. It is taller than the Washington Monument, taller than any masonry structure on earth when it was completed in nineteen eighteen. That stack is all that remains standing of what was, for much of the twentieth century, the largest nonferrous smelting complex in the world.

The story begins with an Irish immigrant named Marcus Daly. In eighteen eighty-one, Daly bought a struggling silver mine on Butte Hill for thirty thousand dollars and sank his shafts deeper than anyone had dared. He hit not silver but copper, an almost incomprehensible quantity of copper, at a moment when the electrical revolution was creating insatiable global demand for the metal. Daly brought in partners, including newspaper magnate George Hearst, and founded the Anaconda Copper Mining Company.

To smelt the ore from Butte, Daly chose a site twenty-six miles west, near Warm Springs Creek. He tried to name the new town Copperopolis, but that name was already taken. So he named it after his mine: Anaconda. The original five-hundred-ton smelter opened in eighteen eighty-four. Within two years it was already too small. By the early twentieth century, the Washoe Reduction Works could process millions of pounds of copper a month and employed thousands of men.

The great smokestack went up in nineteen eighteen, built by a New York chimney firm in just over six months. Nearly two and a half million perforated bricks were laid to create a structure that weighed twenty-three thousand tons and drew fumes from a smelter complex spread across three hundred acres. At its World War Two peak, the smelter produced more than twenty-five million pounds of copper per month.

Atlantic Richfield closed it in nineteen eighty-one. Citizens organized to save the stack from demolition, and in nineteen eighty-six it became a state park. The Anaconda Smelter Stack stands today as a monument to a century of extraction, a reminder of the human cost and industrial scale of the copper age that wired the modern world.