Company Town
The company built a company town, Pullman, Illinois on 4,000 acres (16 km²), 14 mi (23 km) south of Chicago in 1880. 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. One employee is quoted as saying "We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell". Alcohol was prohibited in the town, as George Pullman found it a distasteful habit for his workers; though it was available in the company's Hotel Florence, primarily for the benefit of the hotel guests as it was generally too expensive for laborers.
In 1898, the Illinois Supreme Court required the company to sell off the town which was annexed into the city of Chicago; the surrounding areas, which like Pullman were part of Hyde Park Township, had been annexed in 1889. Today, Pullman is a Chicago neighborhood, State and National Historic Landmark District with an integrated population that has a strong drive towards restoration of this unique district.
Read more about this topic: Pullman Company
Famous quotes containing the words company and/or town:
“I hate the prostitution of the name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and dinners at the best taverns.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)