On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Ed Weick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>Selma, when I was a teenager in the 1940s and 1950s I lived and worked in
>company town, Ocean Falls, in way up coast British Columbia. It was a
>pulp and paper town of some 3,000 in which the company owned everything,
>the houses, the store, the hospital, the schools, the hotel. You name
>it, they owned it. While one likes to think badly of capitalists, and
>many songs have been sung about owing one's soul to the company store, it
>was a very benevolent arrangement. Wages were good, rents were low, and
>everyone was looked after. The company ran a swimming pool which
>produced kids that went to the Olympics. It guaranteed summer
>employment, at good rates of pay, for all of the kids that went to
>university, me included. It's high school produced some of the best and
>brightest in British Columbia. That was my experience of a company town.
>I would not have got the education and opportunities I had if it had not
>been for a benevolent capitalist.
>Problem: A few years after I left, Ocean Falls shut down, never to be
>repeated. It was taken over by a larger pulp and paper company, and its
>operations were moved to Vancouver Island. No company town. No
>benevolent capitalism. You do your work, you earn your pay. That's all.
Interesting. I had a similar childhood, about fifteen years later, through
the sixties, at the other great coastal company town, Powell River. It
had the benefit of being about three times closer to the metropolitan
centre at Vancouver, so around the time the original company sold out
to the big corporation, which withdrew the "company town" system, a
road and ferry route was pushed through to provide a somewhat tenuous
but still cheaper and much higher volume connection to the outside world.
Prior to that, except for freighters to the mill, the only way in or
out was a weekly steamer.
The town also benefited from the much larger mill - it employed as many
at its peak as Ocean Falls' whole population, and the region had a
total population that rose to about 16,000 after the road was put in.
I was just in primary school when the change went through, but the
company town culture lasted pretty much through my childhood.
Company owned facilities were slowly spun off to the municipality
or private owners, and workers could buy, rather than rent their
homes.
Yes, when I was there, children of employees were still guaranteed
summer work at liberal union wages while going to university,
and the culture was very much of a uniform middle class. When
I was at university, by the way, I met one of the last graduates
of Ocean Falls secondary, about my age, watching from the
university residence as the town was finally decomissioned.
I read some material recently about the intentions of the town's
founders, that they had been influenced by a movement in those
days that recognized that the best workforce was one that was
well treated, respected and looked after. I guess this would have
been the same philosophy that led to Henry Ford's pay scales.
The town was founded in 1911, and the design sought to provide
the workers with a fully rounded, healthy and cultured environment.
They provided what I later realized was a richly stocked public
library (it far exceeded the dismal offering I found when I
visited the library here in Ladner, with a comparable, maybe
larger population - the building here is newly renovated, since
I arrived, airy and spacious, yet it must have one tenth the
number of books of the humble little library in Powell River,
which was crammed floor to ceiling with shelves full to bursting
between narrow little aisles. Here the books look lonely and
forlorn scattered here and there on the widely spaced small
shelves).
I had the interesting experience of discovering, the last time I
went back to visit, that the townsite had been declared a world
heritage site, being one of the larges and best preserved examples
of a company town, with about 600 houses, plus schools, parks,
playing fields, movie theatre, dance hall, and hospital, all
still there. And on the door of the house where I grew up was
a plaque honouring a "best restored heritage home". They had
not quite gotten it back to looking how it did when I lived
there.
-Pete Vincent
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