Butte-Anaconda Historic District

By editor

Anaconda, Deer Lodge County, Montana, July 2016

It took millions of miles of copper wire to tie this sprawling, argumentative republic together with telegraphs, telephones, and electric lights, and nearly a third of it came out of the ground right here. Marcus Daly, a man who understood that water and gravity were cheaper than hauling ore over a mountain, planted his Washoe Smelter in Anaconda in 1883 to process the rock his miners were tearing out of the "Richest Hill on Earth" over in Butte. The two towns became sisters in the great industrial family of the Amalgamated Copper Mining Company, bound together by twenty-six miles of railroad track and a shared understanding that the company owned the town, the jobs, and occasionally the politicians. The towering 585-foot brick smokestack, completed in 1919, stood as a monument to the fact that while the miners dug the wealth, the smeltermen breathed the consequences.

Extracting that wealth was a hazardous business, and the danger bred a particular kind of solidarity among the men who did the work. Butte and Walkerville earned the title "The Gibraltar of Unionism," giving birth to the Western Federation of Miners and the Industrial Workers of the World, outfits that looked at the company's ledgers and decided that "wage slavery" was a poor substitute for a fair share. The company, naturally, disagreed. The argument was settled with strikes, lockouts, martial law, and the occasional stick of dynamite. After the Granite Mountain/Speculator Mine fire of 1917 killed 168 men in the worst hard-rock mining disaster in the nation's history, the company simply fired anyone in Anaconda suspected of harboring socialist sympathies, which was an effective, if blunt, method of labor negotiation. It took the federal government and the New Deal to finally guarantee the right to organize, leading to a four-month strike in 1934 that helped birth the CIO and change the labor landscape of the country. In 2006, the National Park Service looked at this 10,000-acre expanse of headframes, smelter ruins, and union halls and declared it the largest National Historic Landmark in the West, a fitting tribute to a place that built the modern world and fought bitterly over who should profit from it.

See also

• Butte-Anaconda Historic District at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County (Montana Historical Society, erected 2016)
• Washoe Theater for more on Anaconda's architectural heritage.