“The Company Town, The Industrial Edens and Satanic Mills that Shaped the American Economy” by Hardy Green

This is a big book. Story after story of exploitive towns, utopian towns, satellite industrial towns, and towns dominated, but not owned, by a single company. The history of company towns spans nearly two hundred years from Lowell, Massachusetts in the 1820s to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in the 1940s to Greer, South Carolina [BMW] in 1990. Mr. Green describes the good, the bad and the ugly in fascinating and learned detail. 

As Mr. Green explains, “Such towns [company towns] generally tend toward one of two models, although many fall in between.” The two extremes of the company town phenomenon ranged from the businesses that fully exploited their workers being guided exclusively by profit to the utopian businessmen guided by a higher principle that included both profit and the welfare of their employees.