In Anaconda a Jack Nicklaus golf course spreads beneath a 585-foot copper smelter stack. Winifred keeps the world’s largest hoard of Tonka trucks inside a town with no traffic light. Ismay once traded its own name to an NFL quarterback and earned a fire truck for the trouble. Terry safeguards nearly 1,800 glass negatives shot by a homesteading British photographer. Virginia City froze in place the year its gold ran out in 1875. These nine towns reward the Montana traveler who chases the odd detail.
Anaconda
When Marcus Daly founded Anaconda in 1883 to smelt copper ore from his Butte mines, the smelter became their entire economy. The smoke carried arsenic, and longtime residents say you could taste it on your lips. Nobody complained. As long as the smoke was coming out, money was coming in. When the smelter closed in 1980, it left behind a Superfund site and a town that had to figure out who it was.
Residents fought to save the 585-foot smokestack when cleanup crews proposed demolishing it. Today, it stands as the centerpiece of Anaconda Smoke Stack State Park, the tallest surviving masonry structure in the world, 30 feet taller than the Washington Monument. The ground is still too contaminated to walk on.
The Old Works Golf Course sits atop the former smelter site, the only Jack Nicklaus Signature course in Montana open to the public, with black slag-filled sand traps and views of the stack from the fairways. The Washoe Theater opened in 1936, one of the last two Art Deco theaters built in the United States alongside Radio City Music Hall. The Smithsonian has ranked it fifth in the nation for architectural value. Adult tickets run $7.