Mega-corporationsfrom Facebook to Amazonare creating modern-day company towns.InMenlo Park, California, Facebookplans tobuilda new campus with 1,500 residences, a walkable retail district, a grocery store, and a hotel for its employees. Meanwhile, Amazon recently announced that it will build a second headquarters that could effectively turn the chosen city into a company townmuch like what happened to Seattle when the online retail giantcame to Seattle in the late 1990s. Dubbed HQ2, approximately50,000 employees will work there.Since the 19thcentury, companieshave built company towns across the United Statesmunicipalities where theyown large percentages ofthe housing, stores, schools, churches, roads, and parks. In these towns, the corporation is also often the largest employer.At their peak a century ago, there were more than 2,500 company towns housing3% of the US population, according to The Economist.As CityLab notes, many early company towns served as a way for corporations to manage labor relations, since they owned all the homes and could evict strike leaders.More modern company towns, like Hershey, Pennsylvania (named after famed chocolatier Milton Hershey's candy corporation), gave residents say in what the town prioritized.Since then, the concept of the company town has evolved. Some have similar tacticsto early company towns, while other companiesbuild massive headquarters thatdominate an existingcommunity's infrastructure and spaceand create a new ecosystem of businesses around the swelling employee population.Take a look at the nearly 200-yearevolution of company towns.SEE ALSO:Amazon could detonate a gentrification 'prosperity bomb' in the mystery city of its new headquartersLowell, Massachusetts by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company (1823)Many historians consider Lowell, Massachusetts to be the first company town in the US.In the early 19th century,Francis Cabot Lowellthe businessman known for pushing the American industrial revolution forward established his first textile factory and the Boston Manufacturing Company inWaltham, Massachusetts.A few years after Lowell'sdeath in 1823, a group of his associatesfounded the town of Lowell (about 20 miles north of Waltham) in his name and a series of textile mills under a new company name (theMerrimack Manufacturing Company). As Smithsonian notes, they recruited mostly young, single women from rural areas to work in the factories (many of whom participated in strikes due to poor working conditions). The workers lived in boardinghouses and attended church, both built by Merrimack.By 1836,18,000 people lived in Lowell. Those employed by Merrimack worked at the textile mills.But by the end of WWII, many of the mills had closed. Today, much of Lowell has transformed into a national historic park and a modern cityof over 100,000 residents that, in recent years, has moved toward apost-industrial economywith growingsuccess.Steinway Village, New York City by Legendary Steinway & Sons pianos (1870)Much of present-day Astoria, Queens in New York City started as Steinway Village, a company town developed by the piano company Steinway & Sons.In 1853, German immigrant Henry Steinway started the business in lower Manhattan. As it grew,Steinway & Sons began to needmore space, so in 1870, itstarted constructinga 400-acre complex, including a foundry, sawmill, an amusement park, library, church, fire house, post office, and housing for its workers (and later, non-employees). The arrangement gave the company a great deal of social control, since Steinway could evictstrike leadersfrom company housing.Today, the original Steinway factory still exists and produces over 1,000 pianos per year.Scotia, California by Pacific Lumber Company (1883)Though Pacific Lumber Company did not found Scotia, California, the companyestablished its headquarters there and maintainedall of the town's housing from the early 1880s to the mid-1980s.Over that time period, the company built 275 homes rented by employees, along with a hotel, post office, several churches, and a shopping center. In 1985, Pacific Lumber's longtime owners sold their business, anda New York hedge fund bought the property.In 2011, Scotia became a self-governing town, where renters could choose to buy their homes. Three years later,it formed its first city council.See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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