Talk:Company town/Archives/2012

Hidden (false?) sentence
This information was hidden (unviewable) on the page and marked as "false". I don't know what to do with it, so I copied here and took it off the main page:


 * Company towns were formed by the transcontinental railroads company towns a Superset were formed by the secific indiustry dynamic. A steel town is not at all like a coal town in longeveity or industry, which bought tracts of land flanking their right-of-way before deciding where to site stations.

sallison 21:36, 22 February 2006 (UTC)

Irvine
I'm having trouble believing that Irvine is still "largely owned" by the Irvine Company. Is that true? I know they're the developer of a number of cities, but the point of being a developer is to dell the land, not hold into it. Can someone clarify the basis of this claim?  &middot; rodii &middot;  02:02, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
 * I'll move it to "former company towns". Regardless of how much land is still held by the Irvine Company, in my opinion it ceases to be a company town once it is incorporated. Crix 05:06, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

I also inserted a paragraph on company towns that were developed as master-planned communities, which fits both Irvine and The Woodlands. Crix 05:19, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Random bolding
What's with random listings in the list being bolded? Murderbike (talk) 02:10, 17 February 2008 (UTC)
 * They're astylistic, I took 'em off....Skookum1 (talk) 03:21, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

BC company town additions
I just added a number that occurred to me, only larger ones and some that are now incorporated; for BC contributors dropping by there are others to consider, large and small; and some are now incorporated or have become part of larger municipalities, like Harmac within Nanaimo (and a few coal towns, Wellington I think was a company town, Cumberland certainly was also, .... Ladysmith, Chemainus and, seeing as it's been mentioned, Zeballos, Woss Lake and other lumber towns on the Island which began as company camps. Government Cannery is now, I think, Waglisla, maybe it's New Vancouver or another now-remote outport, I can't remember.  Kimberley I threw in, and Anaconda and Greenwood should probably be in there; and if they are, so should Trail, which was originally a Cominco company town; also Rossland, British Columbia. There will be some overlap with List of ghost towns in British Columbia Copper Mountain and Camp McKinney are now ghost towns and some ghost towns were company towns in the formal sense, rather than just boomtowns with a dominant company; of course the old saw about Vancouver is that it's a Canadian Pacific company town, but that's a longer discussion. But in general, because of the peculiar resource extraction-only history of BC's economy, for a lot of the province's history company towns were a regular part of life, large towns with no civil government, only corporate rule and such that a lot of towns had no democratic organisms other than their unions. I think Port McNeil and Powell River may certainly also qualify, and others now-gone like Harrison Mills and various mining towns in the Cariboo; Wells was certainly a company town and survives as a municipality, tiny though it is. Kemano, Cassiar, Tumbler Ridge, Sparwood, Elkford, Malakwa...I can think of six BC Hydro townsites that should be included. History of company towns in British Columbia is almost needed, as there were so many, and so varied, and such an important part of the civil and economic history of BC; as in the section following, the entire world list here should be broken off as a List of company towns and the article's textual/content expanded.Skookum1 (talk) 03:21, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Separate the list
As in the conclusion of the previous section, the list contents here should be broken off into List of company towns, perhaps broken down by national basis, Canada, the US and Russia, maybe Australia; and this article be fleshed out with more explanation of the general topic of company towns. Given the Belgian entry, I'd also say some set of parameters to define what's to be included and what's not; university towns don't strike me as fair ball, even for a privately-owned university (which is, generally, primarily a business); and while in the BC comments and additions I've included some towns which are now towns, it's important to remember/research places that began as company-owned/built towns but which since have become municipalities; not just places dominated by one business that otherwise are unincorporated, or like Barriere and elsewhere were so for a long time; can't remember when Kimberley went public, so to speak, and because of Cominco and CP being the same company, it's hard to draw the line between the town being a product of the smelter or a product of the railway's decision to promote a relatively major city, i.e. real estate promotions, on its doorstep, but then all railway-company land sell-offs are different from situations where the company retains title, as at Brarlone or the hydro towns; similarly links between the smelter/milltowns of the Pacific Northwest States with the Northern Pacific and other railways make deciding what is and isn't a company town kinda tricky; but if it's not already on here, Anaconda, Montana comes to mind, and on Puget Sound I don't think Everett is alone in starting out as a company development (I think...). and I know if I thought about Washington for a bit I'd come up with a few more....anyway, I think it's time to break off a separate list, and also to challenge non-company entries, like the Catholic University in Holland; unless college towns across the states, or attached to places like Antioch or Mt. Allison, are to be considered company towns.Skookum1 (talk) 03:21, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

Damned edit
The reference to "dammed sites" had been spelled "damned." I have only ever seen the spelling "damned" to mean "condemned," whereas "dammed" means "blocked (as in a river or canal)." I'm changing the spelling. Jsharpminor (talk) 03:17, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

New Amsterdam
The Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (later New York City) was a Dutch East India Company company town in the 1600s. It seems innacurate to describe nineteenth century Pullman as the progenitor of company towns, Capitalismojo (talk) 11:40, 2 June 2009 (UTC)