Behemoth Smeltertown Smokestack a tribute to mining history
SALIDA -- Taller than both Italy's Leaning Tower of Pisa and the gold-leaf-covered dome of the Colorado State Capitol building, and visible from just about everywhere in the Salida area, the Smeltertown Smokestack wasn't built to be a lasting, or conspicuous, monument to the Upper Arkansas River Valley's rich mining history.
Constructed in less than five months in 1917, this 365-foot-tall stack, with circular and octagonal walls 3 1/2 to 6 feet thick, was the third erected in Smeltertown by the Ohio-Colorado Smelting and Refining Company.
The company's smelter was used to extract locally mined metals like gold, silver, lead, zinc and small amounts of copper and iron from ore hauled to the site. Its smokestacks emitted toxic fumes generated during the smelting process.
Shortly after the first, 150-foot-tall smokestack was put into service in 1902, area farmers and ranchers began complaining to company officials that the fumes were killing trees, decreasing crop yield and sickening livestock.
Fourteen years later, the company announced plans to install the 365-foot-tall stack, ostensibly to provide a better draft and to process larger quantities of ore. But its real purpose was to release the noxious gases higher into the atmosphere, where they would dissipate before harming humans, crops and livestock.
Mounting debt and financial losses, along with an on-site fire, forced the smelter's closing in 1920. Several unsuccessful attempts to demolish the stack were made over the next few decades before a citizen-launched, "Save the Smokestack" campaign in the 1970s resulted in its ownership being transferred to the Salida Museum Association. In 1976, the smokestack was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Today, located two miles northwest of downtown Salida, this iconic landmark -- which required a whopping 264 standard-gauge railcar-loads of pressed, glazed brick and mortar to construct -- is the centerpiece of an interpretive site chronicling its own, and Smeltertown's, history.
--Lynda La Rocca