Finding stability in a company town: A community study of Slickville Pennsylvania, 1916–1943

Rejecting the formidable stereotype of the “company town,” and narrow perspective of capital-labor relations, this study investigates the “model” bituminous coal mining company town of Slickville, Pennsylvania and its immigrant mining families\u27 socio-cultural adaptation to American culture in the first half of the 20th century. The contexts of Slickville\u27s paternalistic structure and the cultural goals of immigrant working families coalesced, to establish for both the coal company and the town\u27s inhabitants, the desired ideal of stability. Created by Cambria Steel in 1916, amidst a volatile era of industrial relations, Slickville\u27s cooperative form of welfare capitalism, as seen through the town\u27s design, landscape, company housing and offered amenities, stabilized its labor force and contributed significantly to immigrant families\u27 adaptation processes. Southern and East-Central European mining families carried pre-migration standards of “a good life” to the modern industrial system which were then shaped by acquired understandings of deplorable conditions in other bituminous coal towns. Qualitatively choosing Slickville as a town in which to live and work, families used all resources available to them, accumulating “family capital,” and purchased land, built homes, opened businesses and began several ethnic organizations within a few years of the Slickville\u27s creation. Immigrant mining families wanted residential stability to consume materially and Cambria Steel wanted a stable workforce to ensure its productive capability. In the process, a community was formed. First and second-generation oral histories describe the boom of the 1920s, how families and kin weathered through the Great Depression, and how Slickville continued after mining operations formally ended in 1943