Chapter 16 Exercises: Company Towns — Living Under Corporate Rule

Exercise 1: Primary Source Analysis — A Miner's Pay Statement

Below is a reconstructed monthly pay statement based on records from a McDowell County, West Virginia, coal operation in 1923.

Employee: J. Barton, Miner Month: March 1923 Days worked: 22 Tons loaded: 91.4 Tonnage rate: $0.52/ton

Gross earnings: $47.53

Deductions: - House rent: $8.00 - Coal (heating): $2.25 - Doctor: $1.50 - Smithing: $0.75 - Burial fund: $0.50 - Electric light: $0.50 - Store account (scrip advances): $31.40

Total deductions: $44.90

Net pay (cash): $2.63

Questions:

1. What percentage of J. Barton's gross earnings was captured by the company through deductions? Show your reasoning.
2. Of the total deductions, what percentage went to the company store? What does this suggest about the scrip system's effectiveness as a mechanism of wage recapture?
3. J. Barton worked 22 days and loaded 91.4 tons. What was his average daily tonnage? How does this compare to the 4–6 tons per shift cited in the chapter text as typical for hand-loading?
4. If an independent store in the nearest town sold the same goods for 25 percent less than the company store, how much less would Barton's store account have been? What would his net pay have been?
5. The burial fund deduction was fifty cents per month. What does the existence of a mandatory burial fund tell you about the expected mortality rate among miners?

Exercise 2: Map Analysis — Reading a Coal Camp Layout

Study the following description of a hypothetical coal camp layout, based on composite details from Sanborn fire insurance maps and company records of camps in Harlan County, Kentucky, circa 1925.

Camp Description — Sawyer Coal Company, Yocum Creek, Harlan County

The camp is situated in a narrow hollow along Yocum Creek, with the railroad spur running along the creek bottom. From south to north:

• Mile 0.0: Railroad junction with the L&N main line
• Mile 0.1: Coal tipple and mine entry (Mine No. 2), company office
• Mile 0.2: Company store (two-story frame building), post office
• Mile 0.3: Superintendent's house (two-story, painted white, fenced yard), two foremen's houses
• Mile 0.3–0.5: "Main Row" — 42 four-room houses for white American miners (unpainted frame construction)
• Mile 0.5: Company church (Protestant), company school (grades 1–8)
• Mile 0.5–0.7: "Italian Row" — 18 four-room houses for Italian immigrant families
• Mile 0.7: Catholic chapel (served monthly by circuit priest)
• Mile 0.7–0.9: "Colored Section" — 24 three-room houses for Black miners and families
• Mile 0.9: Colored church (Baptist), colored school (grades 1–6)
• Mile 1.0: Bathhouse (shared), camp cemetery

The mine guard's post is located at Mile 0.0, at the junction with the main road.

Questions:

1. What is the spatial relationship between the superintendent's house and the different housing sections? What message does this arrangement communicate about social hierarchy?
2. Why is the mine guard's post located at the junction with the main road, rather than near the mine entry?
3. The Black housing section has three-room houses compared to four-room houses for white miners. What does this difference in house size suggest about the company's valuation of its Black workers?
4. The Black school serves grades 1–6 while the white school serves grades 1–8. What are the implications of this difference for the educational opportunities available to Black children in the camp?
5. Italian families have their own section and their own chapel. What does this tell you about the relationship between ethnic identity and spatial organization in the coal camp?
6. The camp cemetery is located at the far end of the hollow, beyond the last houses. Drawing on what you know about mine safety from Chapter 15, why might a cemetery be a significant feature of a coal camp's landscape?

Exercise 3: Debate Framework — Company Towns: Corporate Benevolence or Corporate Control?

Divide into two groups and prepare arguments for the following positions:

Position A: The company town was primarily an instrument of corporate control. - The scrip system was designed to recapture wages - Housing dependency was a deliberate mechanism to prevent organizing - Mine guards functioned as a private police force accountable only to the company - Workers had no political representation or self-governance - Eviction and blacklisting punished dissent

Position B: The company town provided essential services that would not otherwise have existed. - Geographic isolation made company provision of housing, stores, and services a practical necessity - Company-built schools provided educational access that mountain communities often lacked - Company doctors brought medical care to areas with no healthcare infrastructure - Social amenities (baseball, movies, churches) created genuine community - Many former residents remember their coal camp years with warmth and gratitude

After debating both positions, address the synthesis question: Can both positions be simultaneously true? If so, what does that tell us about how power and community can coexist? What framework allows us to hold both the reality of exploitation and the reality of genuine human community within the same analysis?

Exercise 4: Primary Source Analysis — Company Correspondence

Read the following excerpt from a letter written by a coal company superintendent to the company's regional vice president, based on language from actual industry correspondence:

"Dear Mr. Harrison,

I write regarding the labor situation at Camp No. 4. As you know, we have experienced some agitation among the men regarding the store pricing and the scrip discount. A delegation of miners approached me last Thursday requesting that the discount on scrip-to-cash conversion be reduced from 20% to 10%. I informed them that store policy is set by the home office and that I am not authorized to make changes.

I have identified the three men who organized the delegation: Pete Mullins (loader, Section 3), Vincenzo Rossi (loader, Section 5), and Willie Banks (loader, Section 7). I recommend that Mullins and Rossi be given notice and evicted within the week. Banks is a colored man and a hard worker, and I suggest we merely reassign him to a less desirable section as a warning rather than dismiss him, as we are short of colored loaders at present.

I have also requested two additional Baldwin-Felts men for the next thirty days, as a precaution.

Respectfully, J.T. Combs, Superintendent"

Questions:

1. What does this letter reveal about the chain of command in a company town? Who actually makes decisions about company store policies?
2. The superintendent recommends different punishments for the three miners. What factors influence his recommendations? How does race factor into his calculations?
3. The request for Baldwin-Felts agents is described as "a precaution." Against what, specifically, is the superintendent taking precautions?
4. What does the phrase "agitation among the men" tell you about the superintendent's frame of reference? How might the miners themselves have described the same events?
5. If you were a historian and found this letter in a company archive, what would it tell you that oral histories from miners might not? What would oral histories tell you that this letter cannot?

Exercise 5: Comparative Analysis — Two Company Towns

Compare Lynch, Kentucky (U.S. Coal and Coke / U.S. Steel) and a typical small-operator coal camp in Harlan County using the following framework:

Questions:

1. In what ways did the quality of life differ between these two types of company towns? Be specific.
2. In what ways was the structure of control identical, regardless of the quality of services provided?
3. The chapter argues that "corporate benevolence is not the same as self-determination." Using this comparison, explain what that statement means in concrete terms.
4. Which type of company town do you think would have been harder to organize against — and why?

Exercise 6: Oral History Interpretation

Read the following two statements from former company town residents (composites based on oral history collections):

Speaker A (white woman, age 84, grew up in a Harlan County coal camp in the 1930s–1940s):

"It was the best time of my life. Everybody knew everybody. You didn't lock your doors. The children played together all day and nobody worried. Mama didn't have much but she made it stretch. I wish my grandchildren could have known what that was like — that feeling of belonging to something."

Speaker B (Black man, age 79, grew up in Lynch, Kentucky, in the 1940s–1950s):

"We had a good community — I won't lie about that. But let me tell you what we also had. We had a company that told us where to live, what to eat, and how much our work was worth. When Daddy spoke up about the dust in the mine, they moved us to a worse house. That was how they answered you. Not with words. With the house you lived in."

Questions:

1. What common theme unites both speakers' recollections?
2. What distinguishes Speaker A's memory from Speaker B's? How might race and gender shape what each speaker emphasizes?
3. Speaker A focuses on community and belonging. Speaker B focuses on power and consequences. Are these contradictory accounts or complementary ones? Explain.
4. If you were writing a history of company towns and could only quote one of these speakers, which would you choose — and what would be lost by excluding the other?
5. What are the limitations of oral history as a primary source for understanding company towns? What are its unique strengths?

Exercise 7: Economic Analysis — The Closed Currency Loop

Trace the flow of money in the company town system using the following scenario:

A coal company pays its 200 miners an average of $55 per month each in gross wages. Total monthly wage expense: $11,000.

From this, the company collects: - House rent from all 200 miners: $1,800 - Doctor, burial, and utility deductions: $800 - Company store sales (scrip and cash): $7,200 - Scrip-to-cash conversion penalties: $150

Questions:

1. What is the company's total monthly recapture from wages paid? What percentage of the total wage bill is recaptured?
2. If the company store's cost of goods is 60% of sales (meaning the company earns a 40% margin on store sales), how much profit does the company earn from the store alone?
3. Combining rent, deductions, store profit, and conversion penalties, what is the effective cost to the company of each miner's labor per month? (Hint: start with the gross wage and subtract all recaptured amounts.)
4. How does this system compare to a normal employer-employee relationship in which the worker is paid in cash and shops at independent merchants?
5. An economist might argue that the company store provides a service (retail access in an isolated area) and deserves to earn a profit. At what point does a legitimate retail operation become an instrument of exploitation? Where would you draw the line?

Exercise 8: "Sixteen Tons" — Song as Primary Source

Read the lyrics to Merle Travis's "Sixteen Tons" (1946), later performed by Tennessee Ernie Ford (1955). The song includes the famous lines about owing one's soul to the company store.

Questions:

1. Identify at least three specific elements of the company town system that the song references.
2. The song was written by Merle Travis, whose father was a coal miner in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. How does the songwriter's background affect the song's credibility as a historical source?
3. "Sixteen Tons" became one of the best-selling songs in American history. Why do you think a song about coal mining resonated so powerfully with a mass audience in the 1950s — most of whom had never been near a coal mine?
4. How does a popular song about the company town system serve a different historical function than a scholarly article or a company record? What can a song convey that other sources cannot?

Exercise 9: Then and Now — Company Town Sites

Select a former company town in the Appalachian coalfields (Lynch, Benham, Gary, Elkhorn, Kayford, Holden, or another you can identify through research).

Using satellite imagery (Google Earth or similar), historical photographs, and available written sources, create a "Then and Now" analysis that includes:

1. A description of the town at its peak (approximate population, major structures, the company that operated it)
2. A description of the site today (current population, what structures remain, what has been demolished or lost)
3. An analysis of what the physical transformation of the site tells you about the economic and social forces that shaped it
4. A 500-word reflection on the relationship between physical landscape and historical memory: When a company town's buildings are demolished, what happens to the community's history?

Exercise 10: The Company Doctor Dilemma

Consider the following scenario, based on common situations in company-town medical practice:

A company doctor in a Harlan County coal camp examines a miner who has been coughing blood for three months. The doctor believes the miner has a serious lung condition caused by prolonged coal dust exposure. If the doctor reports this as an occupational disease:

• The company may face a workers' compensation claim
• The company may be required to improve dust suppression in the mine
• The miner may be removed from the mine and lose his income
• The doctor's own employment may be jeopardized

If the doctor reports it as a non-occupational illness (tuberculosis or bronchitis, for instance):

• The company avoids liability
• The miner continues working (and continues breathing coal dust)
• The doctor keeps his job
• The underlying cause goes unaddressed

Questions:

1. What are the doctor's ethical obligations to the patient? To the company that employs him? When these obligations conflict, which should take priority?
2. How does the structure of the company doctor system — in which the doctor is paid by the company, not the patient — create a conflict of interest?
3. This scenario anticipates the black lung crisis examined in Chapter 21. How might individual medical decisions like this one, repeated across hundreds of coal camps over decades, contribute to a systemic failure to recognize occupational disease?
4. What structural changes to the healthcare system would be necessary to protect both miners' health and doctors' integrity?

Exercise 11: Comparative Framework — Company Towns and Other Total Institutions

Erving Goffman's concept of the "total institution" was originally developed to describe prisons, mental hospitals, military barracks, and monasteries. Apply Goffman's framework to the company town by completing the following comparison:

Questions:

1. Complete the table by filling in the company town column.
2. In what key ways does the company town differ from a prison as a total institution?
3. Company town residents could technically leave. How did the scrip system, company housing, blacklisting, and geographic isolation make this theoretical freedom practically meaningless?
4. Goffman observed that inmates of total institutions develop their own informal social structures and resistance strategies. What evidence from this chapter suggests that company town residents did the same?

Exercise 12: Writing Exercise — A Day in the Company Town

Drawing on the details provided in this chapter, write a 750–1,000-word narrative account of a single day in a company town from the perspective of ONE of the following:

• A miner's wife managing a household on scrip
• A Black miner who migrated from Alabama to Lynch, Kentucky
• A Hungarian immigrant miner in his first year in a McDowell County coal camp
• A twelve-year-old child growing up in a company town who has never lived anywhere else
• A company store clerk who grew up in the same camp

Your narrative should be grounded in historical detail from the chapter and should capture both the texture of daily life and the structural constraints of the company town system. Focus on specific, concrete moments rather than generalizations.

Exercise 13: Source Evaluation — Whose Records Survive?

Company towns generated multiple types of historical records:

• Company records (payroll ledgers, store inventories, correspondence, reports to shareholders)
• Government records (census data, tax records, mine inspector reports, court records)
• Oral histories (recorded interviews with former residents, usually collected decades later)
• Photographs (company-produced promotional images, documentary photographs, family snapshots)
• Material culture (scrip tokens, store merchandise, mine equipment, household objects)

Questions:

1. For each type of source, identify one thing it can tell us that the other sources cannot.
2. Company records were produced by the companies for their own purposes. What biases should a historian expect when using these sources?
3. Oral histories were typically collected decades after the events described. What strengths and limitations does this time gap create?
4. Company-produced photographs of coal camps often show well-maintained buildings, smiling workers, and orderly streets. How should a historian interpret these images?
5. If you were designing a research project on daily life in a specific company town, which combination of sources would you prioritize, and why?