PBA Galleries

Includes:

• 39 photographs of the Great Falls Zinc Plant, including its source of power (a dam on the Missouri River), exterior and interior views, smelting equipment, etc. The photographs are mounted on white binder paper, typed captions on the paper below the images. Some of the images are dated in the negative, from 1917 to 1919 or so.
• 11 photographs of zinc ore samples, some on paper mounts as above.
• 17 photostats of architectural and mechanical diagrams of the plant and interior components.

Intriguing little archive of the zinc plant at Great Falls, Montana. This was an early zinc smelting plant - up until about 1916 zinc was a nuisance, since it could not readily be separated from other metals. With the development of the flotation process and electrolyte method of refining, such plants as that at Great Falls could be profitable, so much so that the plant was quickly taken over by the giant Anaconda Copper Mining Company, whose name is on some of the diagram photostats.