Goosetown Historic District - Anaconda, MT - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

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Goosetown Historic District - Anaconda, MT

in U.S. National Register of Historic Places

Posted by:  T0SHEA

12T E 350804 N 5109543

Goosetown, or the workingman's neighbourhood, is just one of five historic districts in the city of Anaconda. It lies in the southeastern quarter of the city, nearest the site of the smelter and the foundry, where the majority of residents worked.

Goosetown, by contrast, is a gritty working-class neighborhood, a large, intact and clearly defined working enclave that reflects one-industry development of a community during the period of large-scale industrialization, as discussed in the NHL American Labor theme study. With almost a thousand residences, a number of brick commercial buildings and four ethnic churches, it inhabits the east side of town. Goosetown’s narrow lots, secondary dwellings, boardinghouses, neighborhood saloons, corner grocery stores, and strong ethnic loyalties express cultural identity and economic solidarity common to the blue-collar neighborhoods of urban communities.
From National Parks

Coordinates given are at the site of the Goosetown Historic District Plaque, in Smokestack Park on the eastern edge of the city.

Attracted by the opportunity to work at Marcus Daly’s copper smelter, thousands of immigrants came seeking work in Anaconda. Many were from Ireland, like Daly himself, but skilled and unskilled workers also came from a myriad of foreign places. Most settled in Goosetown, a working-class neighborhood ideally located adjacent to the Anaconda foundry and the original Washoe works site, under the shadow of the Great Stack. Small inexpensive lots, simple frame workers’ cottages, boarding houses and small businesses dating mostly from 1883 to 1918 illustrate the neighborhood’s economic solidarity and working-class character.

Modest homes on narrow lots with bachelor cabins at the rear, rented for a little extra income, are common throughout the district. Occasional saloons and the 1905 Washoe Brewery reflect the private commerce and industry that flourished alongside the dominant smelter-related enterprises. In addition, widows often maintained their families by operating small businesses from their homes.

The Beaudette Block, the Anaconda Meat and Grocery Company and the depression-era Club Moderne are Goosetown’s most significant commercial buildings. Historic churches including the Austrian Roman Catholic, Free Swedish Mission, Norwegian Evangelical Lutheran, and Serbian Orthodox only hint at the many ethnically oriented organizations that offered comaraderie and comfort far from home. There are two schools of thought on the source of Goosetown’s name. The most widely accepted theory attributes the name to the east side bars’ practice of keeping turkeys and geese to raffle off at Thanksgiving. Another theory holds that the neighborhood’s initial freshwater system consisted of a water tap at the end of a gooseneck pipe in each residential yard.
From the NRHP Plaque