Though there are three or four older churches in Anaconda, they are all of brick and/or stone. Most congregations in Anaconda built their first church in the 1800s using wood frame construction, most of which would be older than this church had they still existed. All the others have either burned down or were demolished, usually to make way for a newer, usually stone or brick, church. Of all those
first churches, this is the only one left standing in Anaconda. As a result, we have here one of only two entirely wood framed steeples in Anaconda, and the oldest, the other having been built in 1927 to replace a church that burned. An interesting touch on this steeple is the copper flashing on the tall spire and the copper weather vane atop. This is highly appropriate, as the city of Anaconda was built entirely on the smelting of copper from mines in nearby Butte.
This was one of several Scandinavian facilities built in Anaconda around the turn of the twentieth century, indicating that, by that time, Scandinavians constituted a substantial portion of the population of Anaconda. The Swedish Lutherans occupied the church until the 1920s, at which time it was taken over by the Seventh Day Adventists. They, in turn, have since built a new building and this church has very recently become a commercial building, owned by Southwest Insulation. To what use they intend to put it, we do not know.
The Free Swedish Mission Church [501 Alder, 1899] is the only remaining first-generation, wood-frame
church in Anaconda. A Gothic Revival-style building, it offered services in Swedish, as well as Swedish
heritage activities.
From the National Register, Butte-Anaconda Historic District , Page 83
Three churches were soon organized: Swedish Lutheran Dissenters constructed the Gothic-Revival-styled Swedish Mission Church, which by the mid-1920s housed the Anaconda Seventh Day Adventist congregation, at 501 Alder in 1899; Swedish Lutherans constructed a brick church for the Zion Evangelical Lutheran congregation at 520 Cedar in 1904; and Swedish Baptists bought the frame Union Church, built in 1895, from a Scandinavian congregation in 1904. The frame Scandinavian Union Church at 501 Cedar served as a template for the design of Swedish Mission Church. These two churches, with their plain and simple Gothic-Revival detailing mirrored many of the rural churches in Sweden.
From the National Register, Multiple Property Documentation Form, Page 24