Butte, Anaconda and Pacific Railway Historic District
By editor
Anaconda, Deer Lodge County, Montana
Marcus Daly got tired of paying other people’s freight rates. In 1892 he built his own railroad to haul Butte ore to the Anaconda smelter. He imagined a line to the Pacific. What he got was twenty-six miles of heavy rail between two company towns—and a railroad that, by 1900, was said to carry more tonnage per mile year-round than any other in the country. People called it the Biggest Little Railroad in the Nation.
Most of that tonnage was copper ore inbound and finished copper outbound. In 1913 the BA&P converted from steam to electric locomotives, becoming the first electrified railroad in the United States to haul heavy freight. Cheap hydroelectric power and Anaconda Company copper wire made the conversion affordable. The Milwaukee Road later studied the experiment. From the 1890s through the 1920s, as electricity remade American industry, the BA&P moved more than half the nation’s copper supply at peak periods.
The historic district marks infrastructure that was never scenic for its own sake. It was a conveyor between the Richest Hill on Earth and the Washoe stack—the short, stubborn railroad that made Daly’s vertical empire work.
See also
- Contributions of the Washoe Smelter at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
- Smelting the Ore at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
- Marcus Daly - An Irishman with Vision at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
- Deer Lodge County Courthouse at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County
