America’s Company Towns, Then and Now

The first truly planned company town was Lowell, Massachusetts. In the early 19th century, Francis Cabot Lowell, a merchant from Boston, visited factories in England to try to memorize and (illegally) bring back to the United States the technology he saw there. His pilfered ideas helped lay the groundwork for new textile production in Massachusetts, where, in the 1820s, a few years after Lowell’s death, a small group of capitalists founded Lowell—what Green calls “America’s first large-scale planned industrial community.”

As with many of the business-built towns that would come later, Lowell’s location is based largely on its proximity to natural resources: in this case, a waterfall to power the looms. When it came to that other necessary resources—workers—Lowell’s founders recruited young, single women from rural areas. Once at Lowell, they lived in boardinghouses and were required to attend church and lead a “moral” life. Factory bells woke the women up at 4:30 in the morning—and within 20 minutes, they had to be at the mill. In the mid-1830s, protests began, echoed later by several other company towns across the country.

Today, visitors can explore the Lowell National Historical Park. At the Boott Cotton Mills Museum, looms run “at top speed, allowing visitors to feel the buzz of a working mill.” The museum, whose weave room is pictured above, calls itself one of the largest industrial history exhibits in the nation. The historical boardinghouse for Lowell’s first workers stands nearby, also part of the park.

The Hershey chocolate company needed milk, and so, Green explains, it gravitated toward an area with dairy farms. In 1903, Milton Hershey, who founded the company, began to build what would become the world’s largest chocolate manufacturing plant. Historically, workers in the town Hershey built around the factory were mostly former farmers—and the living conditions they found there in the first decades of the 20th century were considered enticing for the time period. The company provided housing with indoor plumbing, central heating, lawns maintained by Hershey itself and other amenities.

As Green explains, from the start the company wanted tourists to visit and find a kind of Willy Wonka paradise—to see that the workers who made their chocolate treats led happy, prosperous lives. So, in 1903, Hershey also began to survey the land for a park he would then build four years later. After offering an athletic field and boating in 1907, Hershey continued to expand the amusement park with a merry-go-round in 1908 and “two bowling alleys, a tennis court, a large band shell and a photography gallery” in 1909. Today, the roller-coaster-filled park still welcomes visitors, and Hershey continues to be a booming company town. 

The Kentucky town of Lynch was once a booming coal-mining site. Built in 1917 by U.S. Coal and Coke, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, it had a commissary, theater, hotel and hospital and a population of 10,000. But, as Green puts it, coal mining towns, especially in Kentucky and West Virginia, were the pits: barebone settlements, harsh conditions, poverty.

According to the U.S. Census, by 2012 there were only an estimated 726 residents in Lynch. Today, visitors can see rusted equipment in the now-abandoned coal plant. The old mines, meanwhile, are now a museum. The Portal 31 Underground Mine Tour, pictured above, offers tours of one of the mines by rail car. As the website describes it, visitors don traditional protective gear that coal miners would wear, travel through the mine, and see a “1920s lamphouse, bathhouse, L&N train depot and loadout system.” There’s also a memorial to those who died in mining accidents in U.S. Steel’s District #1.

Like Hershey, Pennsylvania, Corning is both a historic company town and one that’s still very much alive. Although the company, once called Corning Glass Works and now called simply Corning, didn’t found the town, Green writes that it “emerged as the town’s benefactor—and savior” in the mid-20th century. The business poured millions of dollars into housing, recreational facilities and a new library. And in 1951, the Corning Glass Center opened—today called the Corning Museum of Glass.

Now, Corning continues production in the area. As of 2009 almost 5,000 employees lived in the town, and Corning Inc. takes an active role in the town's revitalization. Meanwhile, at the continually expanding museum, visitors can explore glass items both ancient and cutting-edge. As the New York Times writes, the museum “began as what the company called a gift to the community for its 100th anniversary,” and has since become famous for its “nearly 50,000 pieces of glass art, some dating from 1500 B.C.” And the building itself dazzles too. The Times notes that a “100,000-square-foot addition, which cost $64 million, is almost certain to be globally recognized as a light-gathering glass masterpiece itself.”