Pullman Company Town
In 1880 Pullman bought 4,000 acres (16 km2), near Lake Calumet some 14 miles south of Chicago, on the Illinois Central Railroad for $800,000. He hired Solon Spencer Beman to design his new plant there. Trying to solve the issue of labor unrest and poverty, he also built a company town adjacent to his factory; it featured housing, shopping areas, churches, theaters, parks, hotel and library for his factory employees. The 1300 original structures were entirely designed by Beman. The centerpiece of the complex was the Administration Building and a man-made lake. The Hotel Florence, named for Pullman's daughter, was built nearby. (see Pullman, Chicago).
Pullman believed that the country air and fine facilities, without agitators, saloons and city vice districts, would result in a happy, loyal workforce. The model planned community became a leading attraction for visitors who attended the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. It attracted nationwide attention. The national press praised Pullman for his benevolence and vision. According to mortality statistics, it was one of the most healthful places in the world.
The industrialist still expected the town to make money as an enterprise. By 1892 the community, profitable in its own right, was valued at over $5 million. Pullman ruled the town like a feudal baron. He prohibited independent newspapers, public speeches, town meetings or open discussion. His inspectors regularly entered homes to inspect for cleanliness and could terminate workers' leases on ten days' notice. The church stood empty since no approved denomination would pay rent, and no other congregation was allowed. He prohibited private charitable organizations. In 1885 Richard Ely wrote in Harper's Weekly that the power exercised by Otto Von Bismarck (known as the unifier of modern Germany), was "utterly insignificant when compared with the ruling authority of the Pullman Palace Car Company in Pullman."
We are born in a Pullman house, fed from the Pullman shops, taught in the Pullman school, catechized in the Pullman Church, and when we die we shall go to the Pullman Hell. —Some alleged Pullman employees living in the Pullman-owned townThe Pullman community is a historic district that has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Marktown, Indiana, Clayton Mark's planned worker community, was developed nearby.
Read more about this topic: George Pullman
Famous quotes containing the words pullman, company and/or town:
“If you find that you can’t make seventy by any but an uncomfortable road, don’t you go. When they take off the Pullman and retire you to the rancid smoker, put off your things, count your checks, and get out at the first way station where there’s a cemetery.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“It has lately been drawn to your correspondent’s attention that, at social gatherings, she is not the human magnet she would be. Indeed, it turns out that as a source of entertainment, conviviality, and good fun, she ranks somewhere between a sprig of parsley and a single ice- skate. It would appear, from the actions of the assembled guests, that she is about as hot company as a night nurse.”
—Dorothy Parker (1893–1967)
“There is a great deal of self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that keeps the earth sweet; that saves on superfluities, and spends on essentials; that goes rusty, and educates the boy; that sells the horse, but builds the school; works early and late, takes two looms in the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)