Company Towns: 1880s to 1935

Coal companies built towns for workers and their families. Theirs was an isolated and organized life. Miners were poor folks who usually stayed poor no matter how hard they worked. The company store kept the books, placing them in crippling debt even though they were the ones whose labor made others rich and gave light and heat to the country.

The colonies were, for men like Burnham, playgrounds, places to carry out ideas without worrying about the counterforces that encumbered action at home. Mainlanders could confiscate land, redirect taxes, and waste workers’ lives to build paradises in the mountains. Filipinos, for their part, were relegated to the sidelines. The segregated spaces at

Construction of the sixty-six-mile extension south from West Palm Beach was aided by a sizable contingent of convict labor leased to the Florida East Coast Railway at the rate of $2.50 a month. The company had to feed and house the men, but it was still an attractive deal when private labor might approach two dollars or more per day. The process to

He decided to lay out a new town on the west shores of Lake Worth, where he would erect the terminal for his railroad. It was a fortuitous decision for Flagler, but one that was to have implications that persist to this day, with the “haves” living in the palatial estates of Palm Beach itself, and the “have-nots” in what was originally conceived of