Morgan Park: Duluth, Us Steel, And The Forging Of A Company Town

By Author: Elizabeth
Total Articles: 286
Comment this article

Morgan Park represents a worthwhile contribution to the growing literature on planned towns in the United States. The industrialization of America is a story told many times, but until recently towns like Morgan Park, which were a major ingredient in this transformation, have received limited attention. Arnold R. Alanen, Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, has documented a community that helps to inform cultural and historical geographers about Pandora Jewelry a crucial period in America's cultural and economic history.

Duluth sits at the edge of Minnesota's Iron Range and was an important ore shipping center in the late 1800s. The vast bulk of the ore was destined for steel manufacturing operations in the Chicago area, but boosters in Minnesota were convinced that they could take advantage of the iron ore to transition from a primary sector economy based on resource extraction to one based on secondary sector manufacturing of steel. US Steel, the largest steel manufacturer in the world, was lukewarm to the idea, ...
... due to its belief that a steel operation in the relatively undeveloped northwest would not be economically viable. In the long run this turned out to be correct, but under pressure from Minnesota's political leadership US Steel began constructing a steel mill outside Duluth in 1907.

Alanen does an excellent job recounting the torturous path of the construction and development of the steel mill at Duluth. As the mill progressed, US Steel recognized that the housing available to workers in the greater Duluth area was problematic at best, and in 1913 began the process of publicizing a new town to be built adjacent to the mill. From the beginning, Morgan Park was a professionally planned community owned and controlled by US Steel. The town was designed by Jewelry Store town planners utilizing features prevalent in the City Beautiful and Garden City movements, while architects employed residential designs unlike anything found in the region. Alanen does an effective job laying out the long planning and construction process for Morgan Park, illuminating the story with sketches of key players in the process as well as discussing important commercial and institutional features incorporated into the plan.

The book is organized chronologically, based on four time periods that shaped the life of the company town. These periods include the organization of the mill and the town (1907-1915), everyday life in a fully functioning planned steel town (1916-1929), a period characterized by economic distress as well as prosperity (1930-1945), and finally the decline and eventual closing of the steel operations in Duluth (1946-2006). Alanen successfully employs maps and photographs in recounting the various twists and turns in the town's history, including boom times, partial plant closings, unionization, strikes, and the eventual sale of the town by the corporation, while at the same time paying close attention to the changing urban landscape of the town. In his final chapter, Alanen explores the major issues in the town today, which revolve around the debate concerning historic preservation and economic progress and whether the two can coexist.

This study is one of many that have appeared in the past several years documenting the emergence of planned towns in America, including works on Greenbelt, Maryland, Vandergrift, Pennsylvania, and Marie-mont, Ohio. The question becomes, what do these studies contribute to our understanding of culture and geography One answer is that they can aid cultural geographers in understanding an important aspect of America's changing cultural landscape, which is the massive urban transformation that occurred in America in the opening decades of the twentieth century. For many Americans, these planned towns, with landscapes based on modern planning principles, represented their introduction to an urban way of life, whether it was a textile or sawmill town in the South or a steel mill town in the North. Understanding the cultural effects of the transformation of American society from the rural and vernacular to a planned urban society is key to grasping modern America, and this book furthers that understanding.