Columbia Falls: Where the Dam Power Became Aluminum
Near Whitefish, Montana
When Hungry Horse Dam was completed on the South Fork of the Flathead River in nineteen fifty-three, it produced far more electricity than rural Montana could use. The Anaconda Company saw an opportunity and spent tens of millions of dollars building an aluminum smelter in Columbia Falls. The plant opened in nineteen fifty-five and at its peak employed well over a thousand workers.
Aluminum smelting requires enormous amounts of electricity, and the dam made it possible. Ownership changed hands from Anaconda to ARCO to a local group over the decades, but the plant kept running until two thousand and nine, when cheap foreign aluminum finally made it unviable. The site now sits idle, an industrial monument to a marriage of New Deal infrastructure and postwar manufacturing.
