Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier by Sarah Fayen Scarlett (review)

Power and hierarchy are expressed in residential neighborhoods in myriad ways—for example: lot size, street trees, architecture, landscaping, proximity to desirable things, and distance from offensive ones. Viewers read these signals and many more in order to assess a home and the status of its occupants. Sarah Fayen Scarlett takes on this social sorting in Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan’s Mining Frontier, her study of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in Michigan’s Copper Country. Scarlett explores the neighborhoods, specific houses, and public spaces of people who were engaged with maintaining power in an inequitable mining industry. Company Suburbs is a fascinating study of how the built landscape reinforces social difference.

To understand the residential landscape that the mining industry spawned, Scarlett takes two well-studied systems—corporate paternalism and suburbanization—and examines their intersection in the Copper Country. Initially, companies provided housing for their elite managers and mining captains, just as they did for miners and unskilled laborers. But, at the Quincy Mining Co., mine officers moved away from their free housing into the elite neighborhood that became known as East Hancock. While suburbs usually connote picturesque surroundings and distance from workplaces, these neighborhoods did not afford the separation of workplace and home that residents might have desired. The mining companies controlled the available land—accommodating their managerial elite but controlling them nonetheless. Hence the term “company suburb.”

Scarlett’s close study of specific houses gives depth to her argument about status and architecture. James Pryor altered his house on the east side of Houghton repeatedly. While meticulously documenting a quarter century of alterations, Scarlett relates his changing circumstances in terms of his business, family size, and wealth. Beginning in 1875 with a modest house built for a manager at Shelden-Columbian mine, Pryor produced an elaborate Queen Anne-style dwelling that faced both Main Street (later College Avenue), which was emerging as a prestigious boulevard, and Portage Lake, where his expanding lumberyard contributed to his wealth. Inside the house, room functions changed as well, finally becoming a fashionable wood-paneled interior with wall paintings and beveled mirrors. This is surely the only occasion of a historian using the room designations written in a fuse box as evidence for her argument!

While Pryor’s house illustrated overlapping landscapes of the industrial and the domestic, Scarlett turns to East Hancock to examine overlapping social landscapes. To understand the world of the Finnish servant who lived in one house in 1900, Scarlett explores how she might have moved through the house—where she was in her domain and where was she on her employer’s turf—as well as how she moved through the neighborhood and town to get to and from the Finnish area. Scarlett similarly looks at movement when she shifts her attention to the Calumet area, where she tracks the construction of houses for the enormously wealthy investors of the Calumet and Arizona Mining Co. In the first decade of the twentieth century, they clustered in a few blocks of the newly developing village of Laurium. But, in 1913, strikers paraded past these very houses on their way to the Palestra, the only building on non-company land that was large enough to accommodate strike meetings. The dissonance between the strikers and the idle wealthy, the street and the mansion, serve to illustrate Scarlett’s point about contentious social geographies.

In this thoroughly researched work, Scarlett combines two areas of study usually kept separate, by scholars as well as geography: industry and suburbs. Her examination of the two together reaps benefits, bringing new insights into the relationship between landscape, people, and power.