Oysters, Macaroni, and Beer: Thurber, Texas, and the Company Store by Gene Rhea Tucker (review)

In this work, Gene Rhea Tucker examines the small North Texas community of Thurber, which was founded in the late 1880s as a coal mining company town. A railroad spur to the mines there ensured that the coal could get to market quickly and made for a successful mining operation for many years. The ownership company, Texas and Pacific Coal Company, later diversified into the brick-making and oil industries, making Thurber a staging-ground for oil fields to the west. While there was success with these new oil fields, the downturn in oil industry profits during the Great Depression spelled the end of Thurber. A population of several thousand lived in the company houses and shopped at the company store before the town was finally dismantled in the 1930s. While Tucker briefly explores the labor-management issues expected in a company town, he focuses mostly on the role of the company store in Thurber and how it intersected with the lives of the inhabitants.

Tucker uses the resources of the Texas and Pacific Coal Company and their subsidiary, the Texas Pacific Mercantile and Manufacturing Company (TPM&M), to develop a portrait of Thurber as a bustling community. These resources also show how Thurber fits into the larger history of company towns. As Tucker points out, company towns and most especially the company store were not often held in high regard, and emerged as points of contention in labor-management agitations. Tucker contends that while the company store run by TPM&M in Thurber did bring in regular profits, they were not reached at the expense of the workers. A number of personal recollections demonstrate that the company store offered a wide assortment of goods of high quality at (mostly) reasonable prices. Tucker points out that these memories differ when examining class: laborers tended to remember prices as trending high while those in salaried positions recalled that the prices were reasonable. Tucker clearly shows the company store was responsive to the needs of the miners. “More than twenty different nationalities and ethnic groups” could be found among the miners, and the store stocked its goods to appeal to these groups (72).

This book makes a convincing case that while arguments over scrip and the company store may have been contentious in many company towns across the nation, the miners in Thurber did not have many grievances with the store. When the miners went on strike, they focused on increased pay, regular pay, and union recognition, not on the store.

Despite the book’s strengths, Tucker misses an opportunity to compare what happened in Thurber after Texas and Pacific Coal (renaming itself the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company) struck oil at Ranger in 1917 to other oil boom towns in Texas. However, Tucker does a good job of portraying how a company store operated in Texas and how in this instance that operation could challenge the stereotype of workers selling their “soul to the company store.”