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1. Saltboxes and T-Plans: Creating and Inhabiting the Company House
- University of Minnesota Press
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Saltboxes and T-Plans Creating and Inhabiting the Company House On July 13, 1907, Joseph Putrich and Antonia Grubesich were married in Painesdale, Michigan. They set up housekeeping in a small dwelling—four rooms plus a kitchen. The wood-frame residence, which had been built five years earlier, was supposed to be temporary; it was set on posts, not a foundation , and had no siding other than horizontal planks over the studs. The Putriches began populating the house with children and boarders. Although their first child died an infant, Joseph and Antonia had seven more children over the next ten years. In 1910 they housed seven boarders, all male, all workers in the copper mine, like Joseph. In 1913 they accommodated ten boarders, again all copper-mine workers. They also had a live-in servant. All of the boarders and servants were, like the Putriches, born in Croatia. The house was crowded, cold in winter, poorly equipped, and shabby by most standards. It belonged to the Champion Copper Company.1 Company houses, built by companies to rent to employees, were a paternalistic extension of the workplace relationship, a visible incursion into the private lives of workers who were tied to the company not only by a paycheck but also by a home, thus making for a complex association. Workers clearly believed it to be advantageous, or at least worthwhile, to accept a company house, while the companies found that diverting important capital from industrial operations for this purpose paid off indirectly. The worker–manager relationship created by company housing can be examined in several ways. The houses that the companies built for their workers can shed light on what the company thought of its worker and the value it placed on him. The attraction of company housing for the worker can be explained in terms of a structure’s location, quality, layout, or size. Although the tenant, usually an immigrant, and company management were the most essential actors, others were significantly involved as well. Scrutinizing the activities of company employees responsible for assigning houses, for designing them, and for building 1 1 them—or to whom those tasks were contracted—is crucial for understanding how these houses came to be. The terms of the unspoken negotiation that ensured both company and worker usually got what they wanted from the housing arrangement helps to explain why this paternalistic system persisted, long after Pullman’s disastrous experience in his railroad-car town. Architecture and Landscape Over the seventy years (ca. 1848–1918) that Copper Country companies were building houses for their workers, they produced thousands of dwellings. In 1913 twenty-one companies owned 3,525 houses that they rented to employees. They built fancy houses for managers and plain ones for workers. They built them out of frame and logs and covered them with shingles and clapboards. Most were one-and-a-half or two stories; one-story houses were rare. Nearly all of them had gable roofs. What the companies built changed over time but not radically. Rising expectations meant that log houses were considered a lesser type and that, particularly after the turn of the twentieth century, workers’ houses became larger and more complex. Some of the forms, though, were remarkably enduring, so a typology is more meaningful than a chronology. The types of houses did not differ much between the companies, either—at least not among the big three of Calumet & Hecla (804 company houses in 1913), Quincy (468), and Copper Range (607).2 Company houses in the Copper Country took various forms, but they were simply conceived. As historians Thomas C. Hubka and Judith T. Kenny have pointed out, before the reform movements and rising standard of living of the early twentieth century, workers’ houses tended to have rooms that served multiple functions and were not architecturally differentiated; the houses were crowded and without privacy. In the early twentieth century the working class gained amenities previously reserved for the middle and upper classes: the three-fixture bathroom, the dining room, kitchen technologies (running water, hot water, means of refrigeration, washing machines), utilities (sewage, electricity, gas), the private bedroom, the storage closet, the front porch, and the car and garage.3 Some of these amenities concern spaces and are revealed in the plan of a house; others concern conveniences that we now think of as utilities and will be addressed in chapter 4. Except for the dining room—an essential allocation of space in houses where there were many boarders...