BiblioVault - Books about Company towns

After The Boom In Tombstone And Jerome, Arizona

Decline In Western Resource Towns

Eric L. Clements

University of Nevada Press, 2014

Focusing on two Arizona towns that had their origins in mining bonanzas—Tombstone and Jerome—historian Eric L. Clements offers a rare study dissecting the process of bust itself—the reasons and manners in which these towns declined as the mining booms ended. Tombstone was the site of one of the great silver bonanzas of the nineteenth century, a boom that started in the late 1870s and was over by 1890. Jerome’s copper deposits were mined for much longer, beginning in the 1880s and enduring until the 1930s. But when the mining booms ended, each town faced its decline in similar ways. The process of decline was more complex than superficial histories have indicated, and Clements discusses the role of labor unions in trying to stave off collapse, the changing demography of decline, the nature and expression of social tensions, the impact on institutions such as churches and schools, and the human responses to continued economic depression. But bust involved more than a steady decline into ghost-town status, Clements discovers: the towns' remaining residents employed numerous strategies to survive and reduce household expenses. In the end, both towns reinvented themselves as late-twentieth-century tourist attractions.

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Company Towns

Industry Power and the Historical Foundations of Public Mistrust

Elizabeth Mitchell Elder

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Reveals the deep, historical roots of public distrust in former mining areas in the US, shedding new light on the corrosive feedback loops that persist today.

In Company Towns, Elizabeth Mitchell Elder examines the long-lasting political legacies of mining-company dominance in the Midwest and Appalachia. While the economic consequences of deindustrialization are well-known, Elder shifts the focus to a more insidious problem: the political dysfunction that took root long before the mines shut down.

Drawing on historical and administrative data, Elder shows that the coal industry hindered the growth of local government capacity in the places where it was dominant. Mining companies also engaged in outright corruption to shape local governments, practices which local elites then carried forward. When mining companies withdrew, they left behind not just economic decline, but local governments ill-equipped to govern.

These patterns have had enduring consequences for public life. Elder shows how these historical experiences have fueled a broader cynicism toward government, in which citizens expect little from public institutions and doubt the usefulness of elections. Company Towns underscores the consequences of corporate dominance for state capacity, public opinion, and democratic accountability today.

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Diamonds in the Rough

A History of Alabama's Cahaba Coal Field

James Sanders Day

University of Alabama Press, 2013

Diamonds in the Rough reconstructs the historical moment that defined the Cahaba Coal Field, a mineral-rich area that stretches across sixty-seven miles and four counties of central Alabama.

Combining existing written sources with oral accounts and personal recollections, James Sanders Day’s Diamonds in the Rough describes the numerous coal operations in this region—later overshadowed by the rise of the Birmingham district and the larger Warrior Field to the north.

Many of the capitalists are the same: Truman H. Aldrich, Henry F. DeBardeleben, and James W. Sloss, among others; however, the plethora of small independent enterprises, properties of the coal itself, and technological considerations distinguish the Cahaba from other Alabama coal fields. Relatively short-lived, the Cahaba coal-mining operation spanned from discovery in the 1840s through development, boom, and finally bust in the mid-1950s.

Day considers the chronological discovery, mapping, mining, and marketing of the field’s coal as well as the issues of convict leasing, town development, welfare capitalism, and unionism, weaving it all into a rich tapestry. At the heart of the story are the diverse people who lived and worked in the district—whether operator or miner, management or labor, union or nonunion, white or black, immigrant or native—who left a legacy for posterity now captured in Diamonds in the Rough. Largely obscured today by pine trees and kudzu, the mining districts of the Cahaba Coal Field forever influenced the lives of countless individuals and families, and ultimately contributed to the whole fabric of the state of Alabama.

Winner of the 2014 Clinton Jackson Coley Award for Best Work on Alabama Local History from the Alabama Historical Association

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The Limits of Revolution

Worker Citizens in a Bolivian Mining City

Elena McGrath

University of Texas Press, 2026

The role of Bolivian mining families in revolution and politics.

In 1952, Bolivia’s Revolutionary Nationalist Movement (MNR) swept into power, promising collective prosperity through class-based nationalism. The heroic symbol of the movement was the worker citizen—the formerly indigenous miner who would fuel economic development in a nationalized mining economy.

The Limits of Revolution explores this history from the worker barrios of the copper mining city of Corocoro. As the state walked back its promises of worker political power at the national level, mining men and women in Corocoro struggled—through protests, court battles, and barfights—to maintain the benefits of worker citizenship locally. After the MNR fell to a military dictatorship in 1964, however, families retreated to defending the nationalized mining company against an increasingly hostile state. In this battle to keep the revolution alive, the expansive potential of worker citizenship disappeared and old racial exclusions resurfaced. Largely forgotten today, Bolivia’s experience of revolution exposes the contradictions of postcolonial nationalism and sheds light on Latin America’s transition from Cold War–era class politics to twenty-first-century Pink Tide politics.

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Morgan Park

Duluth, U.S. Steel, and the Forging of a Company Town

Arnold R. Alanen

University of Minnesota Press, 2008

From 1915 to 1971 the large U.S. Steel plant was a major part of Duluth’s landscape and life. Just as important was Morgan Park—an innovatively planned and close-knit community constructed for the plant’s employees and their families. In this new book Arnold R. Alanen brings to life Morgan Park, the formerly company-controlled town that now stands as a city neighborhood, and the U.S. Steel plant for which it was built.

Planned by renowned landscape architects, architects, and engineers, and provided with schools, churches, and recreational and medical services by U.S. Steel, Morgan Park is an iconic example—like Lowell, Massachusetts, and Pullman, Illinois—of a twentieth-century company town, as well as a window into northeastern Minnesota’s industrial roots.

Starting with the intense political debates that preceded U.S. Steel’s decision to build a plant in Duluth, Morgan Park follows the town and its residents through the boom years to the closing of the outmoded facility—an event that foreshadowed industrial shutdowns elsewhere in the United States—and up to today, as current residents work to preserve the community’s historic character.

Through compelling archival and contemporary photographs and vibrant stories of a community built of concrete and strong as steel, Alanen shows the impact both the plant and Morgan Park have had on life in Duluth.

Arnold R. Alanen is professor of landscape architecture at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His previous books include Main Street Ready-Made: The New Deal Community of Greendale, Wisconsin and Preserving Cultural Landscapes in America.

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White Poplar, Black Locust

Louise Wagenknecht

Oregon State University Press, 2021

Growing up in one of the West’s last company lumber towns, a small community called Hilt on the California-Oregon border, Louise Wagenknecht witnessed the dying years of a unique way of life. The lumber boom of the 1950s and 1960s would devastate the ancient old-growth forests of the Klamath Mountains as well as the people of Hilt, whose lives were inextricably tied to the company lumber mill. White Poplar, Black Locust is the story of that transformation, but it is also something more—a noteworthy addition to the literature of place, and a sensitive and richly textured family memoir. As Wagenknecht unravels the threads that still bind her to both Hilt’s history and her own, unforgettable characters emerge, and what should have been the happy ending to this story, the marriage of her divorced mother to a forester working for the Fruit Growers Supply Company, becomes instead the end of childhood innocence, foretelling the demise of the mill and the end of Hilt itself.

Originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2003, this first book in Louise Wagenknecht’s trilogy about life in the Klamath Mountains is now available through Oregon State University Press, together with Light on the Devils (2011) and Shadows on the Klamath (2021).

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