Copper, Community, and Cultural Survival: 

The Layered History of the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center, Anaconda, Montana

Situated at the corner of East Commercial Avenue and Cedar Street in Anaconda, Montana, the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center occupies a building that has witnessed the full arc of a once-dominant American industrial city: its spectacular rise, its painful decline, and its determined reinvention. At 401 East Commercial Avenue, the former Anaconda City Hall stands as one of the most architecturally distinguished civic structures in Montana, now serving as a center of art, history, and community identity. Yet the story of this building and the institution it houses involves far more than a straightforward tale of preservation. It is a story of labor conflict, civic courage, grassroots cultural activism, and the sometimes overlooked capacity of art to heal social fractures in a working-class community.

Understanding the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center requires engaging with the history of Anaconda itself, a city that was essentially conjured into existence by a single man’s industrial ambition. Marcus Daly, an Irish immigrant who arrived in America at the age of fifteen and ascended from errand boy to copper magnate, chose the site for his smelting operations in what would become Anaconda in 1883 (National Park Service, National Register Nomination Form, 1979). Daly selected the location along Warm Springs Creek in Deer Lodge County for his primary smelter, filing the original townsite plat on June 25 of that year. The city grew with extraordinary speed: by 1884, eighty buildings had been constructed to accommodate a population drawn from across Europe, and by 1900 the town had swelled to 8,551 residents. The Anaconda Copper Mining Company, with its sprawling smelter complex, became the economic gravitational center of southwestern Montana and, by the early twentieth century, the largest copper producer in the world.

Daly nurtured grand ambitions for his city. During the political contests of the 1890s, he campaigned forcefully to have Anaconda designated the capital of the newly admitted state of Montana, a bid that ultimately failed when the capital vote went to Helena in 1894. It was within this climate of civic aspiration that the construction of Anaconda’s City Hall was conceived. The project was financed by a public bond issue of $34,000, reflecting the community’s confidence in Anaconda’s economic trajectory (Library of Congress, HABS Survey MT-53-T, 1933). The design commission was awarded through a competition to the Butte-based architectural firm of Charles Lane and Collins W. Reber, who promised local citizens what the Anaconda Standard described, in its March 21, 1896 issue, as a building of exceptional civic character (National Park Service, Nomination Form, 1979). Construction was carried out by Jacobson and Company, a local firm, and the building was completed for use in 1896.

The architecture of the City Hall reflects the generous eclecticism of the late Victorian era. The structure, measuring 53 by 102 feet, is built of Anaconda red pressed brick on a rock-faced granite foundation, with decorative trim of locally produced Anaconda copper.  The design demonstrates a self-conscious synthesis of historical styles: Romanesque arches define the fire station pavilion; Gothic tracery adorns a dormer; Moorish keyhole windows punctuate the upper facade; and a Chateauesque roof caps one of the projecting bays.  A corner tower originally topped by a 90-foot clock tower provided the building with a verticality that announced civic aspiration from a distance. These towers were eventually removed, the clock tower in 1974, though the building retains the essential character of its original design.

In 1897, the county seat was moved from the town of Deer Lodge to the City Hall building in Anaconda, with Deer Lodge paying the city $2,000 annually to use the facility as the county courthouse until the present courthouse was completed in 1900.  This dual function underscored the building’s centrality to the governance of an entire region during the height of the copper boom.

The Anaconda Copper Mining Company dominated not just the local economy but the social and political fabric of the entire community. Company subsidiaries built and maintained the city water supply, electric power system, and street railway.  This thoroughgoing corporate dominance generated a corresponding tradition of organized labor resistance, and Anaconda became a significant node in Montana’s long history of labor activism. Laurie Mercier’s study of the community examines the distinctive culture of cooperation and activism fostered by residents, who during five decades of devoted unionism embraced an “alternative Americanism” that championed improved living standards for working people. 

The social rupture that would directly precipitate the founding of the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center occurred in the late 1960s. The Copper Village Museum and Arts Center was founded in 1971 with the hope that the arts could help to heal the divisions of a nine-month strike between the Anaconda Company and its workers.  In this context, the effort to establish a cultural institution was not merely a civic amenity project; it was a deliberate act of community reconstruction.

The individual most responsible for transforming this vision into a functioning institution was Sister Joeann Daley, O.P., a member of the Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa, who founded and directed Anaconda’s Copper Village Museum and Arts Center.  In 1971, she led the project for a cultural center and made it her master of arts thesis topic. Together with Anaconda residents, she formed the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center. Funding provided by the county and the Montana Arts Council, professional guidance from a Billings architect and a director of a Bozeman art gallery, and help from over two hundred volunteers turned an abandoned building into a first-class art gallery. 

Daley gained access to the Anaconda smelter, where she recorded the machinery and the hardship and dignified strength of the people who flowed through the gates in daily shifts.  She returned to Anaconda in 1985 after seven years of studying art in Italy, and subsequently worked for the Montana Arts Council, helping small communities identify, connect, celebrate, and grow their cultural assets. 

In 1978, the Anaconda Community Development Agency proposed demolishing City Hall as part of a six-block urban renewal and redevelopment plan aimed at revitalizing the downtown area. Local preservationists mobilized to protect the structure’s historical value. Key to the rescue efforts was Alice Clark Finnegan, chairman of the local Historic Preservation Office, who led a citizens’ group in filing a court action that successfully halted the demolition proceedings in the fall of 1978.  The preservation campaign drew support from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which provided a grant supporting the building’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places. This historic structure was saved from demolition, renovated, and is currently on the National Register of Historic Places.  In 1985, the Copper Village Board and Tri-County Historical Society undertook the preservation project to save and renovate Anaconda’s abandoned City Hall.  The museum moved into the building in 1988.

The building is home to the Marcus Daly Historical Museum and the Anaconda Company Archives, an exhibit hall, a local artist gift shop, and a meeting spot for many civic organizations.  While promising to tell the story of Deer Lodge County history, the Copper Village first had no museum collection. Montana Historical Society personnel and Copper Village staff and volunteers conducted research, began collecting historic objects, and developed the museum. 

The institution’s durability over more than five decades reflects a specific model of community cultural stewardship. Founded not as an expression of elite philanthropy but as a direct response to social division in a working-class industrial city, the Copper Village Museum and Arts Center has maintained a commitment to accessibility. The director of the museum has noted that art is often more than beautiful drawings, that it really tells a story and makes you feel hope and joy, and that the founders worked to save the current location from demolition, creating opportunities for the community that endure to the present day. 

The history of the building at 401 East Commercial Avenue offers a concentrated illustration of a broader pattern in American cultural history: the conversion of industrial-era civic infrastructure into platforms for community memory and cultural expression after the industries that generated such infrastructure have departed. What distinguishes the Anaconda case is the degree to which this process was driven not by professional curators or government agencies but by a Dominican nun with an art teacher’s convictions, a preservationist willing to file court papers, and two hundred volunteers who believed that a building and a community were worth saving.

Works Cited

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