History

Anaconda was Marcus Daly’s town. The copper magnate founded it in the 1880s as the industrial base for his mines at Butte — a city of smelters, workers’ housing, and company infrastructure laid out on the Deer Lodge Valley floor. By the time the Washoe Theatre was built in 1936, Daly had been dead for more than three decades, but the Anaconda Company that bore his name still dominated the town’s economy, employing most of its working residents and maintaining control of local institutions at a level rare even in an era of company towns.

The decision to build a major movie palace in a town of Anaconda’s size reflected both the company’s paternalistic investment in worker amenity and the broader cultural moment: by the mid-1930s, going to the movies had become the defining leisure activity of American working-class life, and a proper cinema was as much a civic necessity as a school or a church. B. Marcus Priteca, who had designed theaters for the Pantages circuit and other major operators, brought to Anaconda the same level of design attention he applied to his urban commissions. The result was a building whose ornate plasterwork, painted murals, and Deco-geometric ornament would not have been out of place in Seattle or Denver.

The theater opened in 1936 and operated through the full arc of the American movie-going era: the golden age of Hollywood through the 1940s and 1950s, the decline of downtown theaters as suburban multiplexes drew audiences outward, and the preservation effort that kept the building operating into the twenty-first century. The Anaconda Company itself ceased copper smelting in 1980, leaving the town to redefine its economy; the Washoe remained as one of the most intact monuments to the industrial prosperity that had built it.