United States
At their peak there were more than 2,500 company towns, housing 3% of the US population.
One of the first company towns in the United States was Pullman, Chicago, developed in the 1880s just outside the Chicago city limits. The town, entirely company-owned, provided housing, markets, a library, churches and entertainment for the 6,000 company employees and an equal number of dependents. Employees were required to live in Pullman, despite the fact that cheaper rentals could be found in nearby communities. In 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court required Pullman to dissolve their ownership of the town.
Another famous company town was McDonald, Ohio, which was created by the Carnegie Steel Company to house and serve the needs of its employees in the Youngstown, Ohio area.
In the present day United States, it is relatively rare for any place in which a single company owns all the property to be granted status as an incorporated municipality. Rather, companies will normally prefer their wholly owned communities to remain unincorporated as this permits administration of the community to be carried out by appointed company officers rather than elected officials. However, there are incorporated municipalities that are heavily dependent upon a single industry or organization and may be loosely considered a "company town", even though the company does not technically own the town.
A different type of company town has appeared in the U.S. since the 1960s, where real estate companies started developing uninhabited tracts of unincorporated lands into huge master-planned communities. These can be called company towns since they were not developed as part of a city, but completely on their own. Often these towns then grow into full fledged cities and then become incorporated, such as Irvine, California.
The adjacent cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, near Orlando, Florida in the Reedy Creek Improvement District, are most widely known as the location of Walt Disney World Resort. Being company towns, they are entirely owned by Disney-related companies. A few token persons reside on the site; all are either employees of Disney or their immediate family members.
Read more about this topic: Company Town
Famous quotes related to united states:
“What chiefly distinguishes the daily press of the United States from the press of all other countries is not its lack of truthfulness or even its lack of dignity and honor, for these deficiencies are common to the newspapers everywhere, but its incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion. It is, in the true sense, never well-informed.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“It is said that the British Empire is very large and respectable, and that the United States are a first-rate power. We do not believe that a tide rises and falls behind every man which can float the British Empire like a chip, if he should ever harbor it in his mind.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I feel most at home in the United States, not because it is intrinsically a more interesting country, but because no one really belongs there any more than I do. We are all there together in its wholly excellent vacuum.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“... the yearly expenses of the existing religious system ... exceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown!... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?”
—Frances Wright (1795–1852)
“Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.”
—Marc Fumaroli (b. 1932)