Lewis and Clark named nearby Belt Butte for its girdle of rocks, and in 1877 John Castner named his town Belt. Coal brought Castner here, and Fort Benton was the first market for his Castner Coal Company. In 1889, the Boston and Montana Consolidated Copper and Silver Mining Company built reduction works at Great Falls in part because Belt coal was available. Castner sold his claims to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company, which had absorbed the Boston and Montana, and their mine soon employed a thousand men. Belt boomed, and by 1900 it was Cascade County’s second-largest community, with a population above 2,800, including French, Finnish, Slav, German, and Swedish immigrants. During this boom, in the late 1890s, the jail was built while 32 saloons flourished in town. Fire destroyed the Anaconda mine in 1915, and in 1930 the smelters stopped using coal. Belt’s population declined, but it remained a center for the surrounding agricultural area. The jail survived major floods in 1909 and 1953, and a 1976 fire caused by a train derailment that destroyed five homes and three businesses.