Greater than a century in the past, there was a city the place households of various races lived facet by facet. Neither housing nor education was segregated, and blacks and whites obtained the identical wages for a similar work. Additionally they loved many interesting facilities, from high-quality houses to a three-story YMCA. When the historian Dorothy Schwieder and the sociologists Elmer Schwieder and Joseph Hraba interviewed dozens of former residents for his or her 1987 e book Buxton, the old-timers’ reminiscences have been positively glowing. One African-American lady remembered the place as a “sort of heaven.”
That isn’t a phrase one ordinarily associates with a coal-mining firm city. However Buxton, Iowa, was constructed by the Consolidation Coal Firm.
Firm cities are imagined to be probably the most predatory type of proprietary communities: micro-dystopias the place debt-ridden staff are compelled to buy at a monopolistic firm retailer. Even within the extra benevolent settlements the place so-called welfare capitalism held sway—in, say, the chocolate magnate Milton Hershey’s mannequin city of Hershey, Pennsylvania, with its free faculties and company-funded public transportation—there have been robust overtones of paternalism. And, usually, a hope that such facilities would preserve staff from organizing for higher situations on their very own phrases.
That picture was all the time exaggerated: Whereas abusive firm cities undeniably existed, the financial historian Value Fishback made a powerful case in 1992’s Soft Coal, Hard Choices that the abuses have been restricted by a sometimes-intense competitors for staff. However in Buxton, the corporate retailer did not even attempt to keep a monopoly: The locals have been free to compete with it, and plenty of launched companies that did. And the facilities weren’t there to lure miners away from unions, as a result of the miners have been unionized from the beginning.
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The Buxton saga begins with one other Iowa firm city, referred to as Muchakinock. Coal firms usually recruited black staff as strikebreakers, and in 1880 Consolidation began bringing black Virginians to Muchakinock for precisely that function. They proved to be good workers, and the corporate saved recruiting African-American staff after the labor strife died down.
It wasn’t uncommon that competitors for labor would profit black miners. Fishback notes, for instance, that coal firms keen to draw African-American workers made an effort to “cut back the inequality of the West Virginia segregated college system.” However Muchakinock supplied an unusually excessive stage of racial equality. An unincorporated neighborhood fashioned across the settlement, with unbiased black companies and a mutual assist society, referred to as The Colony, that adjudicated disputes and helped pay miners’ medical bills.
When the mines have been practically depleted, the corporate moved many staff to a brand new spot in close by Monroe County. There, in 1900, Buxton was born. Right here the black workers have been not strikebreakers: The mines have been unionized, with a contract that lined each black and white staff. One other unincorporated neighborhood grew, with church buildings, retailers, newspapers, lodges, and secret societies. By 1905, unbiased historian Rachelle Chase wrote in Creating the Black Utopia of Buxton, Iowa, it was “a city of 5,000 the place 55 p.c of the inhabitants was black.” The everyday Iowa coal city was a lot smaller, and the everyday Iowa city of any kind was overwhelmingly white.
So why did it die? As a result of even a voluntaristic order may be too centralized. So long as the city relied on one firm—and one finite useful resource—it wasn’t constructed to final.
Buxton was constructed round a single business. That had many results, together with a social hole between the individuals who ran the mines and everybody else. (When Hraba and the Schwieders interviewed one superintendent’s daughter, they discovered that she did not even notice how built-in Buxton had been. Her household had caught to socializing with the opposite managers’ households, and he or she by no means visited the corporate retailer.) Most significantly, it meant the city’s fortunes have been certain up with the corporate’s fortunes.
Because the mines at Buxton have been depleted, Consolidation began opening new settlements—Consol in 1914, Haydock in 1918—and transferring staff away from Buxton. As the explanation for the city evaporated, so did the city; by 1922 it was deserted. Then the business itself hit some lean years, and coal camps began shuttering throughout the state. Consolidation itself fell on onerous instances, and an Illinois firm absorbed it in 1925.
Let Buxton be each an inspiration and a cautionary story. This misplaced Iowa city exhibits how market forces can enhance dwelling requirements and foster social tolerance. However it affords an essential reminder too: If you’d like a neighborhood to final, do not put all its eggs in a single basket.
