McCloud: Housing by Ethnicity, Wages by Race

The town of McCloud was built in eighteen ninety-seven by the McCloud River Lumber Company, which meant the company built the town in the most literal sense. It owned the houses, the water system, the stores, the commissary, and the school. Workers did not rent from a landlord. They lived in company housing and bought from company stores.

The company organized its labor force by ethnicity and paid wages accordingly. White workers received the better housing and the higher wages. Japanese, Chinese, and Indigenous workers received the remaining housing and lower wages for work that was often identical. This arrangement was legal, documented, and the explicit policy of the company operating here.

The town is named for Alexander McLeod, a Hudson's Bay Company trapper who passed through the area in eighteen twenty-nine, more than sixty years before the company town was built.

McCloud operated under full company ownership for more than fifty years. The physical town still stands. Some of the company-era buildings are still visible. The arrangement those buildings housed is not marked anywhere on them.

Note: detailed documentation of housing segregation layouts and wage differentials is not well preserved in public archives for McCloud. Siskiyou County Museum and California labor history archives hold the closest available primary sources.