Building to Extract: Architecture and Natural Resources (ARCH 1901): Company Towns

Industrial archeologists study towns and landscapes created over the past several centuries that were planned to integrate home and work. This ground-breaking book features architectural case studies of company towns in 48 locations - workers' villages, mill towns, mining towns, cité ouvrières, bruk städer, colonias industriales, villaggi operai - many of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites. Extensive illustrations and images document the ways in which architectural experiments responded to the entrepreneurial initiatives that were the basis of these communities. The authors, two esteemed professors whose work focuses on the conservation of industrial heritage, examine the role of architectural and urban culture in creating the identity of these unique towns, and the consequences of their abandonment.

Julie Whitesel Weston left her hometown of Kellogg, Idaho, but eventually it pulled her back. Only when she returned to this mining community in the Idaho Panhandle did she begin to see the paradoxes of the place where she grew up. Her book combines oral history, journalistic investigation, and personal reminiscence to take a fond but hard look at life in Kellogg during ?the good times.? Kellogg in the late 1940s and fifties was a typical American small town complete with high school football and basketball teams, marching band, and anti-Communist clubs; yet its bars, gambling dens, and brothels were entrenched holdovers from a rowdier frontier past. The Bunker Hill Mining Company, the largest employer, paid miners good wages for difficult, dangerous work, while the quest for lead, silver, and zinc denuded the mountainsides and laced the soil and water with contaminants. Weston researched the late-nineteenth-century founding of Kellogg and her family?s five generations in Idaho. She interviewed friends she grew up with, their parents, and her own parents? friends?miners mostly, but also businesspeople, housewives, and professionals. Much of this memoir of place set during the Cold War and post-McCarthyism is told through their voices. But Weston also considers how certain people made a difference in her life, especially her band director, her ski coach, and an attorney she worked for during a major strike. She also explores her charged relationship with her father, a hardworking doctor revered in the community for his dedication but feared at home for his drinking and rages. The Good Times Are All Gone Now begins the day the smokestacks came down, and it reaches far back into collective and personal memory to understand a way of life now gone. The company town Weston knew is a different place, where ?Uncle Bunker? is a Superfund site, and where the townspeople, as in previous hard times, have endured to reinvent Kellogg?not once, but twice.  

Company towns are often portrayed as powerless communities, fundamentally dependent on the outside influence of global capital. Neil White challenges this interpretation by exploring how these communities were altered at the local level through human agency, missteps, and chance. Far from being homogeneous, these company towns are shown to be unique communities with equally unique histories. Company Towns provides a multi-layered, international comparison between the development of two settlements-the mining community of Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia, and the mill town of Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. White pinpoints crucial differences between the towns' experiences by contrasting each region's histories from various perspectives-business, urban, labour, civic, and socio-cultural. Company Towns also makes use of a sizable collection of previously neglected oral history sources and town records, providing an illuminating portrait of divergence that defies efforts to impose structure on the company town phenomenon.