MTHS Honors Margie Smith with Heritage Keeper Award

• July 19 2022

Margie Smith of Anaconda will be honored Aug. 5 with the Montana Historical Society’s 2022 Heritage Keeper award.
The public ceremony to honor Smith’s preservation efforts will be held at 4 p.m. at the Montana Hotel in Anaconda, as part of the Smeltermen’s Day weekend festivities.
MTHS Trustee and past awardee Ken Robison will recognize Smith with the distinctive Heritage Keeper award, which is bestowed annually by the Montana Historical Society Board of Trustees. It honors Montanans who provide distinguished service to the state and people of Montana by protecting our history and culture.
“These awards represent the highest honor the Historical Society can bestow upon those doing the daily work of saving Montana’s past for future generations,” said Hal Stearns, MTHS board president. “Their contributions, and their level of devotion, are amazing.”
For more than 40 years, Smith has been a force within the Smelter City's historic preservation community. Her determination and grit saved the Anaconda Copper Mining Company’s smokestack, the Montana Hotel, and the annual Smeltermen’s Day celebration.
The Anacondans to Preserve the Stack committee formed in 1982 when the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) began dismantling its Anaconda smelting complex. Smith worked with grassroots stakeholders to develop creative solutions to save the complex’s most visible and evocative structure.
Smith’s collaborator on the project, John Cozby, recalled in 2018 that she “was the one behind not only getting people together to save the stack, but (also) to organize the group as a corporation so we were recognized legally.”
Smith also nominated the stack to the National Register of Historic Places and negotiated a no‐cost proposal with Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks to designate the 585‐foot stack a state park. Today, the stack is a beloved icon of Anaconda’s mining heritage.
In 2018, Smith revitalized the Anaconda Company’s annual Smeltermen’s Day — an event previously held by the company — to bring people to Anaconda to celebrate the centennial of the stack. The popular event now features many activities, including bus tours to the stack, an art walk, a brewfest, a half-marathon, and an oral history recording booth.
In two years, the event raised $19,000 for the stack’s preservation.
For more than ten years, Margie Smith and her husband Pete also have worked to preserve the Montana Hotel, a downtown Anaconda landmark. They founded the Anaconda Restoration Association and, with help from an army of volunteers, wrote grants and raised more than $100,000 to reconstruct the failing west lobby floor system, install historically sensitive flooring, and introduce a new entryway. The project restored the valuable historic building, giving Anaconda a first-class space to gather.
The Montana Historical Society trustees also named Arlyne Reichert of Great Falls as a Heritage Keeper; an event honoring her efforts was held in Great Falls in June.
The Sons and Daughters of Montana Pioneers received the prestigious 2022 Heritage Guardian award, which recognizes a person or organization’s outstanding record of accomplishment and profound impact on Montana’s history. MTHS Director Molly Kruckenberg will present the Heritage Guardian Award to the Sons and Daughters of Montana Pioneers at its annual meeting Aug. 19 in Butte.