A single photograph captures a man balanced on the rim of a brick chimney 300 feet above a factory town, laying brick with no ropes, no scaffolding, and no net. But the most surprising detail is not the height—it is that the man is standing on the inside of the chimney, not the outside. America’s great brick smokestacks, some exceeding 500 feet, were built from within. Workers climbed up through the hollow center of the tower they were constructing, standing on the rim to lay each new ring of brick.
The method was born of necessity: wrapping a 500-foot tower in external scaffolding would have cost more than the chimney itself and would likely have blown over in the wind. These towers served a simple industrial purpose. Taller chimneys created a stronger draft, which produced hotter fires and more efficient furnaces. They also carried poisonous smoke high enough to spare the towns below from the worst of the pollution.
The pressure to build ever higher was constant, producing brick towers of 400 and 500 feet across New England and the industrial West by the early 1900s. The key to the construction was a specialized brick patented in the late 1860s by German brick maker Alfons Custodis. His curved, perforated “radial bricks” locked together naturally into rings, were lighter than solid brick, and allowed the tower to flex in the wind without cracking. By 1908, his company had built roughly 6,000 chimneys worldwide.
The builders erected a wooden platform inside the hollow shaft, resting on beams stretched across the interior. As each ring was completed, they lifted the platform higher and continued. Lime mortar, intentionally softer than modern cement, allowed the towers to sway slightly in strong winds without breaking. The tallest brick chimney ever built still stands in Anaconda, Montana.
Completed for a copper smelter in 1918, the 585-foot stack is taller than the Washington Monument, which would fit inside it nearly completely. Its base is 76 feet across, and its walls are over 22 inches thick. It required more than 2. 4 million curved bricks weighing close to 24,000 tons.
Construction took just 142 working days. An average of 12 bricklayers per shift laid roughly 1,500 bricks each per day, working from a scaffold built from 305,000 board feet of lumber—the wood of about 10,000 trees—all housed inside the growing tower. The most dangerous moment, however, came after construction. When the similar stack in Great Falls, Montana, was completed in 1908, standing 506 feet tall and briefly the world’s tallest, two workers died in the effort.
Ralph Jones fell 180 feet in July 1908 during construction. Peter Yeager fell 220 feet in May 1909 while dismantling the inside scaffold that had kept the crew safe throughout the build. Once a tower was finished, a second trade took over. Steeplejacks climbed the bare exterior using iron spikes driven into mortar joints and short ladders lashed to each spike.
Reaching the top, they worked from hanging planks to repoint mortar, replace cracked bricks, and install lightning conductors. These towers were built to move. A steeplejack on a high stack in a rising wind could feel the entire structure lean out and return, several feet in each direction. Lightning strikes were a constant threat, often shattering rims and forcing repairs.
The trade disappeared as mills closed, concrete and steel replaced brick, and scrubbers reduced the need for tall stacks. The Great Falls tower was dynamited and dropped in 1982. The Anaconda stack still stands, fenced off inside a state park, nearly unchanged since the final brick was set by hand on November 30, 1918.