A company town is a town or city in which much or all real estate, buildings (both residential and commercial), utilities, hospitals, small businesses such as grocery stores and gas stations, and other necessities or luxuries of life within its borders are owned by a single company. Marktown, Clayton Mark's planned worker community in Northwest Indiana is an example of a company town. The term is used in the US and UK to refer to a town or city where loyalty to the company that is perceived to be responsible for its success is expected and that company is, or was, a major employer in the area.
Read more about Company Town: Overview, United States, Outside The United States, Paternalism, The Pullman Lesson, Model Company Towns, The Decline of American Company Towns
Famous quotes containing the words company and/or town:
“The Bermudas are said to have been discovered by a Spanish ship of that name which was wrecked on them.... Yet at the very first planting of them with some sixty persons, in 1612, the first governor, the same year, “built and laid the foundation of eight or nine forts.” To be ready, one would say, to entertain the first ship’s company that should be next shipwrecked on to them.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Three miles long and two streets wide, the town curls around the bay ... a gaudy run with Mediterranean splashes of color, crowded steep-pitched roofs, fishing piers and fishing boats whose stench of mackerel and gasoline is as aphrodisiac to the sensuous nose as the clean bar-whisky smell of a nightclub where call girls congregate.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)