Washoe: Anaconda's Coal Town at the Foot of the Beartooths
Near Red Lodge, Montana
Tucked against the Beartooth Mountains in Carbon County, Washoe was a company town built by Anaconda Copper, and for a generation it existed to feed the great smelter. Fred and Annie Bartels had bought the land from the federal government in nineteen oh three, before it passed to the company. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company bought the land in nineteen oh six and the following year established the Washoe Coal Company here, dispatching twelve hundred tons of coal a day to Anaconda's furnaces at Butte.
The workers who lived in Washoe did not own the land beneath their houses but they built those houses themselves. The town had a school, a company store, and a tight-knit population bound together by the single purpose of keeping the smelters burning. That purpose ended when Montana Power began supplying cheaper electricity in the nineteen-teens and Anaconda shifted away from coal.
The company had less and less use for Washoe, and the town gradually emptied. Today it registers as a ghost town in Carbon County, another reminder that every company town lives on borrowed time. The post office opened in December of nineteen oh seven and closed in July of nineteen fifty-nine.
Washoe sits on Montana Secondary Highway three oh eight, between Belfry and the county seat of Red Lodge, and many of its buildings still stand.
