The Legacy of American Copper Smelting: Industrial Heritage versus Environmental Policy

Chapter 4. Montana

Chapter 4 Montana The city wasn’t pretty. Most of its builders had gone in for gaudiness. Maybe they had been successful at first. Since then the smelters whose brick stacks stuck up tall against a gloomy mountain to the south had yellow-smoked everything into uniform dinginess. The result was an ugly town of forty thousand people, set in an ugly notch between two ugly mountains that had been all dirtied up by mining. Spread over this was a grimy sky that looked as if it had come out of the smelters’ stack.1 —Dashiell Hammett, 1929 ARCO save that stack, touch not a single brick Signify the livelihood that made Anaconda tick. Still let it stand there stark against the sky, Like a somewhat obscene gesture catching every eye.2 —Tom Dickson, 2001 November 9, 2008 Driving west on US 90 fifteen miles from Butte, Montana, travelers get their first glimpse—and it is dramatic and huge. It dominates the skyline, but not in the same way that the Empire State Building towers over New York or the Eiffel Tower stands above Paris. The Washoe Smelter stack sits on a geologic plateau seven hundred feet above the valley, the city of Anaconda, and Warm Springs Creek, and in front of a mountain as tall as it. This entire landscape is rooted in the Montana Rocky Mountains, just ten miles from the Continental Divide. Locals enjoy letting you know that the stack, at 585 feet, is as they Montana 102 have committed to memory, the largest free-standing masonry structure in the world, thirty feet taller than the Washington Monument. But the lone stack sits in a view-shed of equally tall and imposing geologic features. You know it’s big because the Rocky Mountains are big. You know it’s big because you can clearly see it from more than ten miles away. Unfortunately , you really can’t get a sense of exactly big it is. From even a halfmile away, the stack has still not come into its full height, chiefly because the stack is the only remaining part of what was once one of the largest, most complex, and most advanced copper smelters in the world. Unlike in New York and Paris, no surrounding buildings or structures give it proper scale; in fact, you can’t get a real sense of its immense size until you stand right next to it and look up (see figure 4.1). It is remarkable that the stack was saved from demolition. Certainly one of the most complex, heavily photographed, and—arguably—entertaining parts of many copper smelter reclamation efforts is the demolition of the stack. These structures are often among the tallest free-standing structures in any given county, and their demolition is a very dramatic event that causes as spectacular a shift in the landscape as their erection once did. The 1982 implosion of the Great Falls (MT) smelter stack, for example, was called slow and defiant and was touted as one of the city’s most heavily attended events.3 Following the announcement of plans to demolish the Washoe stack Montana 103 just a few months after the Great Falls stack came down, a group of dedicated residents formed a committee to save the Anaconda stack, initially as a memorial to the remarkable efforts of the masons who built it; but, as the movement gained popular support, the soon-to-be-preserved stack came to commemorate the town and smelter workers as well, both still reeling from the shock of the smelter’s closure and the deliberate disappearance of other cultural landmarks of their history. Equally peculiar, but for very different reasons, are the remaining slag wall settling ponds in Butte at the former site of the Butte Reduction Works. This long-lived and innovative early-twentieth-century smelter had immense ponds near its site to store copper-rich tailings. Instead of erecting masonry walls or earth dikes, the company used slag, a waste resource it had on hand. To create the walls, smelter workers erected temporary forms of sheet steel to create boxes roughly 10’ (l) x 8’ (w) x 4’ (h), and poured molten slag into the forms, let the slag set, then moved the walls to the next section and poured again, eventually building up a substantial series of structures— some over fifteen feet high—that impounded an area of approximately one...