St. Mark's Episcopal Church

By editor

Anaconda, Deer Lodge County, Montana, August 2022

When Marcus Daly decided in 1883 that the world needed more copper and he was the man to provide it, he built a smelter town on Warm Springs Creek and called it Anaconda. The town grew with the frantic energy of a place where money was being made faster than it could be spent, but the Episcopalians among the population found themselves waiting seven long years for a proper place to pray. Until the cornerstone for St. Mark's Episcopal Church was finally laid on October 21, 1890, the faithful relied on the occasional visit from Bishop Richmond Leigh Brewer of Helena, or priests riding over from Deer Lodge and Butte. They held services wherever they could find a roof, first in the Methodist Episcopal Church South building, and later, in a stroke of frontier practicality, in the rooms above Foskett's saloon. It was there that the Reverend A. B. Howard of Deer Lodge once performed a baptism using water hauled up from the bar downstairs, served in a beer mug, a christening that surely prepared the child for the realities of life in a mining camp.

Even after they secured their own building, a handsome Romanesque Revival structure built of buff sandstone quarried near Garrison, the congregation's fortunes remained tethered to the whims of the copper market. The church, originally designed in the shape of a Latin cross with a square entrance bell tower, was forced to close its doors for several months in 1892 when the smelter shut down and the town's economy evaporated overnight. The building survived the bust, however, and a later brick addition squared off the space between the transept and apse, leaving St. Mark's as one of the most decorated and enduring churches in Anaconda, a reminder that while faith is eternal, the collection plate depends entirely on the price of ore.

See also

• St. Mark's Episcopal Church at Anaconda, Deer Lodge County (Montana Historical Society, erected 1990)
• Hearst Free Library for more on Anaconda's early institutions.