Alison Hoagland 328 pages hardcover
During the nineteenth century, the Keweenaw Peninsula of Northern
Michigan was the site of America's first mineral land rush as companies
hastened to profit from the region's vast copper deposits. In order to
lure workers to such a remote location--and work long hours in dangerous
conditions--companies offered not just competitive wages but also
helped provide the very infrastructure of town life in the form of
affordable housing, schools, health-care facilities, and churches. The
first working-class history of domestic life in Copper Country company
towns during the boom years of 1890 to 1918, Alison K. Hoagland's
Mine Towns investigates how the architecture of a company town
revealed the paternal relationship that existed between company managers
and workers--a relationship that both parties turned to their own
advantage. The story of Joseph and Antonia Putrich, immigrants from
Croatia, punctuates and illustrates the realities of life in a booming
company town. While company managers provided housing as a way to
develop and control a stable workforce, workers often rejected this
domestic ideal and used homes as an economic resource, taking in
boarders to help generate further income. Focusing on how the exchange
between company managers and a largely immigrant workforce took the form
of negotiation rather than a top-down system, Hoagland examines
surviving buildings and uses Copper Country's built environment to map
this remarkable connection between a company and its workers at the
height of Michigan's largest land rush. 
