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Company Towns

Company towns were developed by Industrial-era capitalist ventures in mining and manufacturing, and developed rigidly structured towns which generated, maintained, and reflected differentiation and stratification within the social ranks occupied by management and various levels of skilled and unskilled labor. These company towns vary by region, industry, and temporal context, but each demonstrates important clues about the intended or real relationships between labor and capital. High initial capital investment costs in technological and industrial aspects of the work frequently resulted in a company’s attempt to recapture this capital by providing minimal investment in infrastructure including heating or indoor plumbing.

Beyond the exchange of labor for compensation, extractive employees became entangled in comprehensive, sometimes feudalistic, relations with employers. Because most work sites were isolated, often by rugged terrain, management assumed varied ancillary functions. Thousands of firms ran stores or provided housing for employees. From the southwestern oilpatch boomtowns to the eastern coal camps, the characteristic form of architecture was the "shotgun house." (The name derived from its simple design, which featured a central hall that ran the length of the building. If a shotgun were fired in the front door, the shot would exit the back door without touching anything inside.)

Reformers, as well as companies, took up aesthetics to encourage social harmony and stability in the lives of workers. Company housing exemplified these aesthetics, employing simplicity, minimalism, and reinforced particular uses for interior spaces. Smaller units with separate entrances and smaller rooms reinforced a middle-class focus on the nuclear family in place of the communal values of the boardinghouse. The separation of rooms in company housing reinforced middle-class conceptions of divided social, work, and private spaces.

Many companies fed their workforce. Logging-camp cookhouses served three to five meals daily to dozens or sometimes hundreds of lumberjacks. Workers consumed a diet that averaged up to 9,000 calories per day. To supply the cookhouse opened at Samoa, California, in 1892, the Hammond Lumber Company maintained its own farms, ranches, dairies, and slaughterhouses. Such activities illustrate an instance in which welfare concerns for producing social order in the long term were overshadowed by concerns for reproducing labor power in the short term. More commonly, the tasks of feeding, bathing, massaging, and nurturing fell to workers' wives or other female household members.

Many firms created company towns with privately owned schools, saloons, and other institutions. For instance, at the turn of the century, the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company owned "the water works, smelting works, its docks, railroads, churches twenty-six in number, eight schools, hospitals and almost everything else" in the copper-mining center of Calumet, Michigan.

Coal mining operations ran an authoritarian system, the heart of which was the coal company town. The coal companies, owned by outside interests, exercised enormous social control over the miners. The coal company town was really not a town in the usual sense of the word. But it was a complete, autonomous system. In addition to owning and controlling all the institutions in the town, coal company rule in southern West Virginia, included the company doctor who delivered the babies, the mines in which the children went to work, and the cemeteries where they eventually were buried.

Windber, Pennsylvania, a coal community built in 1897 by Berwind-White Coal Mining Company, boasted a range of institutions. Distribution of company services and placement of company facilities reflected and reaffirmed racial segregation. Indeed, that pattern preceded erection of the Jim Crow system and extended beyond the southeastern US. New Almaden, California, site of the New Almaden Mine, exhibited segregation in the mid-19th century. At this operation of the Quicksilver Mining Company near San Jose, which produced one third of the nation's mercury in the century after its opening in 1846, separate schools and hospitals served the "Spanish camp" and the "English camp" by 1860. In the most extreme manifestation of segregation, the turpentine camps in Georgia and Florida employed only African-American workers. With the abolition of slavery, turpentine firms used the company store (together with the criminalization of indebtedness), convicts, and other methods to maintain an unfree labor force.

The typical coal mining community was not a town in the ordinary sense. The place where the town stood was the point at which a coal seam had been opened, buildings had been erected, and machinery had been installed. The dwellings, or shacks, clustered about the tipple or straggled along the bed of the creek, and there seemed to be always a creek in those coal mining communities. And these dwellings were occupied solely by the men who worked in the mines. There were some management personnel -- the store manager, company doctor, principal of the nearby school. But other than that type of personnel, the houses were occupied by miners.

These communities were really not called towns. They were more often called ``camps''--the mining camp down the way, or the Glen White mining camp, the Stotesbury mining camp, or the Slab Fork mining camp, the Tams mining camp, or the mining camp at Helen, West Virginia. No one owned his own house. He could not acquire title to the property. No one owned a grocery store or a garage or a haberdashery. There was no Main Street of small independent businesses in the mining camps. There was no body of elected councilmen to pass on repairs for the roads or sanitation problems. There was no family physician who built up a successful practice by competing with other physicians.

The coal company owned all of the houses and rented them to the miners. It owned the company store. It owned the pool room. It owned the movie theater. It built the church. The company employed the physician and collected a small sum monthly from each miner to help pay the company doctor. The coal company controlled life and activities of the little community. It was responsible for the sanitation and sewage disposal. The company's ownership usually extended to the dirt roads that ran alongside the railroad tracks or through the middle of the mining camp along by the creek.

Semimonthly paydays occurred and miners were given statements showing how much they owed the company and how much the company owed them. Among the items charged against the miners in this account were the indebtedness incurred by the miners at the company store, rent for their house, electricity for their house, heating, meaning coal; the miners heated their houses with coal, and they bought this coal from the company for which they worked. They got it at a cheaper price, but they paid for their coal. And also included in this account was a monthly checkoff for doctor services or use of the hospitals. The hospitals usually were several miles away and located in the incorporated towns. There was a charge for use of the company washhouse in which to clean up after a day's work. The miner paid the same amount for doctor and hospital services whether there was an illness in his family or not. An additional sum would be paid for such services as occurred with childbirth.

Despite corporate paternalism, workers in company towns developed a stronger sense of community than existed in many parts of industrializing America. In the coal towns of Appalachia, the mining camps of the West, and the mill towns of the southern piedmont, workers and their families developed bonds of community and networks of mutual assistance to deal with the hardships of industrial labor. Feelings of solidarity among workers’ families did little to mitigate poor housing, unsanitary conditions, oppressive management, and the other burdens of life in a company town, but did provide communal ties essential in coping with the difficulties of industrial labor.

The most devastating mine explosion in West Virginia history occurred at Monongah, West Virginia, on December 6, 1907, killing 361 men and boys. The coal company employed a troop of doctors from Fairmont to report to Monongah. They stood around bonfires all night waiting to administer to survivors. None ever came. Over 250 women became widows, and 1,000 children became fatherless. A survey indicated that 64 widows were pregnant. The company cancelled all debts for the widows and other dependents at the company store. Credit was then allowed for all of them. Those who lived in the company houses were notified that no house rent would be collected so long as they remained single.

A striking example of the self-made coal men of West Virginia, William Leckie was born in Scotland in 1855. He started to work in the coal mines when ten years old. At twenty-one he migrated to America and found employment in the anthracite mines of Pennsylvania. Saving his money, he obtained an education at Dickerson College. Returning to the coal mining industry, he worked for the Heading Coal & Iron Co. and then for the Buck Mountain Coal Co.

Notwithstanding his distinctive success as a coal operator, Colonel Leckie was at heart thoroughly democratic. His camps are model ones, with modern homes, concrete walks and landscaping. His interest in social and welfare work was frequently demonstrated in the most effective manner. His popularity with the miners was accounted for in part by the fact that he has never forgotten that he himself was a miner and the evident pride he manifested in that circumstance on many occasions. Great care wastaken in the upbuilding of the mining communities. The houses are durably constructed and many public buildings have been erected. One interesting circumstance was that the streets all ran at an angle across the valley, thereby securing perfect drainage.

Anjean WV was named for Ann & Jean Leckie, mother and daughter of the owner of Leckie Smokeless Coal Co., which constructed the Anjean mining operation and operated it for over 60 years before going bankrupt in 1993. The Anjean mines were opened in 1925 in the Sewell and Fire Creek seams. This was probably the Greenbrier Field's most productive operation, utilizing both deep and surface mining methods to extract the smokeless coal along Big Clear Creek. Mining at Anjean continued into the 1990s. Royal Scot Minerals was the final operator of the Anjean mines, themselves going bankrupt and closing the operation in 1999.

From 1908 until the city incorporated in 1959, Sugar Land TX was a true company town. The Imperial Sugar Company and its affiliate, Sugarland Industries, owned virtually all the enterprises—mercantile, car dealership,  bank, pharmacy, grocery store. But it was a successful town: everyone had a job. Even during the depression, Imperial did not lay off employees. And purchases at the company stores were charged against the Imperial paycheck. The concept of a company town worked well because Sugar Land was remote; in the early days, roads were poor and Houston seemed to be a great distance. People simply didn’t have the time to go there to shop—especially with just about everything right there in Sugar Land.

In lieu of lawful money of the United States, many corporations compensated employees for services by company script, or cash orders which may include checks, direct deposits or money orders on banks convenient to the place of employment where suitable arrangements had been made for the deposit for employees for the full amount of wages. Company script could only be redeemed at the company store where clerks charged inflated prices.

West Virginia Code § 21-5-5 was originally enacted to alleviate the situation in which coal companies required miners to make their purchases at the company store, owned by the coal company, either by deducting said purchases from their wages or by being paid in company script which was spendable only at the company store. By enacting this statutory provision, the legislature not only denounced the unfair practices of the coal companies, but also set forth, via the statute, a substantial public policy against such practice, which is evidenced by the legislature making such practice constitute a criminal misdemeanor. The purpose of West Virginia Code § 21-5-5 was to eliminate the employer practices of forcing employees to purchase goods at companies owned by the employer but which had nothing to do with the employees' employment.

Company rule also included the company police in the form of mine guards, who would toss the miners into the company jail -- not into the county jail but the company jail -- or administer the company beating when the miners attempted to organize into a union. It was a complete rule, and it was a ruthless rule in many instances. Consequently, when the miners went on strike for their union, they did so not for simple wage increases always, but, in many instances, for their very dignity and freedom.

The miners used scrip largely in making purchases at the company store. The scrip was in the form of small metal tokens rounded like coins, stamped in various denominations. The companies accepted this scrip in lieu of real money at the pool room, at the movie theater, and at the company store. It was a subservient existence - a civilization within a civilization. There was no escape from it.