As one approaches the City of Greenwood,
Canada's Smallest City, from the south they will encounter a small brick smokestack beside a welcome sign and a historical marker. The smokestack, about 18 feet in height, is a replica of the 36m (121ft) high
BC Copper Company smokestack. The most prominent landmark in the City of Greenwood, the smokestack overlooks a huge black slag pile.
Though the
BC Copper Company Smelter lived a longer and more profitable life than the ill fated Boundary Falls Smelter nearby, it nonetheless still lived a comparatively short life in commercial terms. Completed in 1901, it fell silent in 1918, a scant 17 years later, a victim of plummeting copper prices after the war.
In its lifetime, however, it made quite a stir, spawning the City of Greenwood, which grew to a population of over 3,000 at its peak, then as quickly imploded to as few as 200 citizens soon after the smelter closed. Greenwood was incorporated as a city in 1897 and remains a city - the smallest in Canada, both in population and area - now with a population of less than 700.
Unlike many of its late brethren, this smelter has left behind a few reminders of its heyday - The 121 foot tall smokestack, the old power substation which fed electricity to the smelter and a vast black slag pile which stretches south along the highway from Greenwood, among others.
Mining In the Boundary
The BC Copper Company Smokestack is 36m (121ft) high and a prominent landmark on the edge of Greenwood overlooking the huge Slag Pile. The smelter was originally built with a sheet steel smokestack that was replaced by the present brick stack when the works were expanded in 1903. The brick stack was originally 36 metres, the highest in the province, and contained nearly 250,000 bricks.
The most noticeable thing about Greenwood as you drive into town is the huge slag pile and imposing smokestack. The smelter was built by the British Columbia Copper Company, a New York-based organization that bought the Mother Lode mine in 1898. The smelter was erected on a 28-hectare site at the mouth of Copper Creek (now called Mother Lode Creek) in the town of Anaconda, just south of Greenwood. the nearby superintendent’s house, which still stands today, was the only smelter building built in Greenwood.
“The Vancouver Province” newspaper described the smelter as “
one of the most complete and modern in the world today…It is a model plant in every respect on which money has been spent unstintingly, and the machinery installed is the most modern in engineering practice.”
February 18, 1901 marked the
blowing in of the first furnace. The smelter was open 24 hours a day and employed 47 men during the first year. That year 106,000 tonnes of ore was smelted. On January 18, 1902, a record amount , 416 tonnes, (about 9 tonnes for every man employed, were smelted. The smelter operated very successfully until 1912 when shortages of ore began to affect production. Throughout World War l the smelter worked intermittently at a reduced rate and on November 26, 1918 closed forever. The plant was sold to Leon Lotzkar who disposed of the machinery and later gave the site to the City of Greenwood as a park.
From the Greenwood Museum