REO Town: When Workers Built Their Own World
Near Lansing, Michigan
The neighborhood you are passing through is called REO Town, named for the automobile company that once employed much of south Lansing. But the story of REO Town is not really about the cars. It is about what workers built for themselves when one factory became the center of an entire community's gravity.
Ransom Olds founded the REO Motor Car Company in nineteen oh five after being pushed out of Oldsmobile by investors. He chose a site on South Washington Avenue, just south of the river, and the plant grew steadily through the first two decades of the twentieth century. At its peak, REO employed thousands of workers and produced automobiles and trucks that sold across North America.
What made REO Town unusual was the REO Clubhouse, a building the company constructed adjacent to the factory for workers and their families. The clubhouse offered recreation and entertainment spaces. The message was paternalistic in structure but genuine in scale: the company wanted workers' entire social lives organized around the plant.
The relationship between REO and its workers grew more complicated as the union movement spread across American industry in the nineteen thirties. REO workers took part in the union drives that swept Michigan auto plants after the famous Flint sit-down strikes against General Motors, and the movement brought the formal protections of collective bargaining to Lansing.
REO stopped making passenger cars in nineteen thirty-six and focused on trucks. The company changed hands multiple times before Diamond REO Trucks filed for bankruptcy in nineteen seventy-five. The factory closed. But the neighborhood survived, and in recent decades it has reinvented itself as a destination for local restaurants, breweries, galleries, and small businesses.
