Morgan Park, The Company Town U.S. Steel Built
Near Duluth, Wisconsin
In the early nineteen hundreds, United States Steel Corporation built a new steel plant at the western end of Duluth, beside the St. Louis River. They did not build just a plant.
They built a town. Morgan Park, named for J. P.
Morgan, whose consolidation of the iron and steel industries had made U.S. Steel possible, was designed from scratch as a community for the company's workers: concrete houses of identical construction, a company store, a clubhouse, a school, a hospital, athletic fields, and a community garden.
Every house was built to the same plan, stamped from the same mold, distinguished from its neighbors only by minor variations in layout. The idea was Progressive Era paternalism in its most complete American form. U.
S. Steel believed, or at least argued, that providing workers with decent housing, recreational facilities, and community infrastructure would produce a stable, contented workforce less likely to join unions or go on strike. The company controlled the rent, the store, and, to a considerable degree, the social calendar of everyone who lived there.
Morgan Park was not Duluth's first company town, but it was the most elaborately planned. Its concrete houses, built of concrete, still stand today along the streets Morgan Park laid out over a century ago. The neighborhood is now part of Duluth proper, its corporate parentage mostly invisible to a driver passing through.
The Morgan Park operations wound down by the early nineteen eighties, the victim of foreign steel competition and the broader collapse of American heavy industry that would reshape the Great Lakes region across a generation. The houses remained. So did the streets.
What U.S. Steel built to last, the physical community, outlasted U.
S. Steel's interest in maintaining it by decades. That is the particular irony of company towns: the community outlasted the company that built it.
