Anaconda Smelter Stack
— a brick chimney taller than the Washington Monument.
Not only on a wall.
“A 585-foot brick chimney standing alone on a hill above Anaconda, the last upright piece of the Washoe smelter that ran from 1919 until 1980. The stack is visible from twenty miles down the Deer Lodge Valley. Nothing else of the smelter complex remains; the chimney was kept because it was bigger than what anyone wanted to take down.
Anaconda Smelter Stack, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Anaconda Smelter Stack rises 585 feet above the slag hill east of Anaconda, Montana, in the Deer Lodge Valley. It was completed in 1919 to serve the Washoe Reduction Works of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, then the largest copper smelter in the world. At the time of construction it was the tallest freestanding masonry structure ever built. The base measures 75 feet across and the brick walls are over two feet thick. The stack is taller than the Washington Monument by thirty feet.
The chimney is built of approximately 2.5 million bricks, laid in a tapering cylindrical form atop a reinforced concrete foundation seated in bedrock. When the smelter closed in 1980 the surrounding buildings were demolished, but the Atlantic Richfield Company donated the stack to Montana for preservation in 1985. It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The brick was manufactured locally to withstand the sulfurous gases that passed through it for sixty-one years.
The stack is the centerpiece of Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park, a view-only site with no public access to the base. The slag hill is closed for safety and ongoing Superfund remediation under the broader Anaconda smelter listing. A roadside viewpoint on Montana Highway 1, east of town, offers the clearest line of sight. The town of Anaconda itself, founded by Marcus Daly in 1883 as a company town, preserves the old courthouse and the Washoe Theater within a short drive of the park.