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:
“Vanessa wanted to be a ballerina. Dad had such hopes for her.... Corin was the academically brilliant one, and a fencer of Olympic standard. Everything was expected of them, and they fulfilled all expectations. But I was the one of whom nothing was expected. I remember a game the three of us played. Vanessa was the President of the United States, Corin was the British Prime Minister—and I was the royal dog.”
—Lynn Redgrave (b. 1943)
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Today’s difference between Russia and the United States is that in Russia everybody takes everybody else for a spy, and in the United States everybody takes everybody else for a criminal.”
—Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990)
“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 white American man makes the white American woman maybe not superfluous but just a little kind of decoration. Not really important to turning around the wheels of the state. Well the black American woman has never been able to feel that way. No black American man at any time in our history in the United States has been able to feel that he didn’t need that black woman right against him, shoulder to shoulder—in that cotton field, on the auction block, in the ghetto, wherever.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)