The Industries That Shaped American Towns
A single employer could build a town's housing, fund its schools and set its rhythm for a century. When the industry moved or died, the town remained. Local history is largely the history of that relationship.
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- What happened
- From the nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth, many American towns grew around a single industry or employer: arms and typewriters in Ilion, New York; textiles in the Carolinas; steel in the Monongahela Valley. Later waves of consolidation and relocation left the towns and took the jobs.
- Why it matters
- The pattern repeats. The question of what happens to a place when its defining industry changes is as current for towns built around data centers or battery plants as it was for mill towns.
- What remains uncertain
- Why some towns reinvented themselves and others did not. Historians point to institutions, infrastructure and luck in different proportions.
Ilion, New York, is a village of a few thousand people on the Erie Canal. For most of two centuries its largest employer has been the arms maker founded there by Eliphalet Remington in 1816. In the 1870s that company began manufacturing typewriters, an invention it did not create but made practical, and the typewriter business grew into the Remington Typewriter Company and eventually Remington Rand. For a time a single village had a hand in both how America fought and how it did its paperwork.
The company town pattern
Ilion is one example of a pattern repeated across the industrializing United States. A company located where water power, a canal, a railroad or raw materials were, and a town grew around it. The company often built housing, endowed a library and a hospital, sponsored the baseball team and dominated local politics. Textile towns in New England and later the Carolinas, steel towns in Pennsylvania and Ohio, and auto towns in Michigan followed the same logic.
What the arrangement gave and took
At their best such towns offered steady work, a path from immigrant to homeowner and a civic life organized around the plant. At their worst they offered dependence: wages set by one employer, housing owned by it, and no alternative when it faltered. Labor conflicts in company towns were often bitter for precisely this reason.
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E. Remington and Sons of Ilion, New York, began manufacturing typewriters in the 1870s.
Fact · confidence high
- Sholes and Glidden typewriter collection records · Smithsonian National Museum of American History
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