Anaconda Smelter Stack
smoke stack at Anaconda, Montana, USA
The Anaconda Smelter Stack is the tallest surviving masonry structure in the world, with an overall height of about 585 feet (178.3 m), including a brick chimney 555 feet (169.2 m) tall and the downhill side of a concrete foundation 30 feet (9.1 m) tall. It is a brick smoke stack or chimney, built in 1918 as part of the Washoe Smelter of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company (ACM) at Anaconda, Montana, in the United States. A terra cotta coating covered the entire brick chimney when new, but by the time the smelter closed in 1981, most had eroded away except for the upper 40%, exposing most of its bricks and reinforcing rods. The inside diameter at the bottom of the brick chimney is 76 feet (23.2 m) while that at the top is about 60 feet (18.3 m). The stack and its viewing area are now the two-part Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park.
Dimensions
Brick chimney
The overall height of the stack is 585 feet 1+1⁄2 inches (178.35 m) (≈ 585 feet), including a brick chimney 555 feet 1+1⁄2 inches (169.20 m) (≈ 555 feet) tall and the downhill side of a concrete foundation 30 feet (9.1 m) high. This was the height when new in 1918, but loss of the terra cotta that covered the top course of bricks since then reduced its height one or more inches. The lowest 68 feet (20.7 m) of the brick chimney is an octagon, the vertices of which point to the cardinal and intercardinal directions, north, northeast, east, etc., while its sides face the secondary-intercardinal directions, north-northeast, east-northeast, etc. Two large vertical openings are in the octagonal portion, each 12.5 by 60 feet (3.8 m × 18.3 m), on its east-southeast and south-southwest sides. When operational, the main flue carried hot exhaust gases to these openings and then into the stack from the smelter which was on the north side of the hill upon which the stack rests.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q483555. VIAF identifies the subject as 136157912. The Library of Congress control number is n88295624. Authority coordinates are 46.110, -112.914. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1918 and 1981.
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This entry incorporates text from “Anaconda Smelter Stack” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.