“Follow the Money!” – Anaconda Company – Largest Mortgage Ever Recorded in Missoula County – 1923
Big Mortgage Deed About Half Copied
Anaconda Company’s Instrument Probably Largest Ever Recorded Here
The work of transferring to the records of Missoula county the big mortgage deed indenture of the Anaconda Copper Mining company, conveying in trust all of its Montana holdings to the Guaranty Trust company of New York, has been about half completed in the five days that a member of the county clerk and recorder’s force has been occupied with it.
The indenture fills two complete volumes, one of 177 pages and the other of 250 pages. It has to be copied into the record books of the clerk and recorder’s office in full. Not a period or comma may be omitted. When the copying has been done the tedious process of comparing the copy with the original and correcting mistakes and omissions must be carried on. The work will have taken all of the working hours of one expert stenographer during ten days.
The mortgage is probably the largest by far ever entered at the local court house. The property conveyed in trust by the Anaconda Copper Mining company is to secure a loan of $200,000,000. It includes mine properties, real estate, timber lands and all the holdings of the company in the state of Montana.
The above article appeared in The Daily Missoulian on April 2, 1923.
https://www.newspapers.com/image/352381086
A paragraph from Wikipedia, regarding the history of the Anaconda Mining Company, may shed light on their mortgage activity in 1923. As the old saying says, “Follow the money.” See below:
The golden twenties
During the 1920s, metal prices went up and mining activity increased. Those were really the golden years for Anaconda. The company was managed by the Ryan-Kelley team and was growing fast, expanding into the exploitation of new base metal resources: manganese and zinc. In 1922 the company acquired mining operations in Chile and Mexico (Cananea).
The mining operation in Chile (Chuquicamata), was acquired from the Guggenheims in 1923.[7] It cost Anaconda $77 million and was the largest copper mine in the world. It produced copper yielding two-thirds to three-fourths of the Anaconda Company’s profits.
The same year ACM purchased American Brass Company, the nation’s largest brass fabricator and a major consumer of copper and zinc. In 1926 Anaconda acquired the Giesche company, a large mining and industrial firm, operating in the Upper Silesia region of Poland. This nation had gained independence after World War I.
At that time Anaconda was the fourth-largest company in the world. These heady times, however, were short-lived.