Closer to home, beginning in the 1820s, the Lowell Company in Massachusetts housed its young female employees in a planned town of chaperoned boardinghouses. The masonry tenement buildings and reform school at the Scottish cotton mill town of New Lanark were nearly a century old in 1879, and Pullman may have visited the well-planned woolen mill village of Saltaire (1851) on a trip to England. ![]() This led him to conceive a community far more comprehensive and substantial than factory towns elsewhere in the United States at the time, a community that would, as a result, reinforce his company’s reputation for beauty, order, and efficiency.Ĭentral to Pullman’s ambitions was that his new town should contain distinct the industrial and residential sections, but this idea was not unprecedented. But because of its remoteness, the site required Pullman to provide housing for his employees. The site was advantageously located on a long, narrow plot bordered by Lake Calumet on the east and the Illinois Central Railroad to the west. He purchased 4,000 acres of vacant low-lying land in Chicago, fourteen miles south of the Loop. With his business a great success by 1879, Pullman decided to build a new, purpose-built facility for his Pullman Palace Car Company. Before long, Pullman’s name became synonymous with the luxurious cars he produced in his first factories in Detroit. In 1864, Pullman began manufacturing rail cars with private compartments that converted from seats to fold-down bunks at night. Though it is now diminished in size, the Town of Pullman remains a visually cohesive community that tells an important story about labor, factory production, and American rail travel at the turn of the twentieth century. Pullman’s town did become an inspiration, but to workers, not owners, as it became an emblem of the power of unified labor. A crucial corollary was that the worker happiness produced by the town’s serene environment would forestall unionization and produce a six percent annual return on investment, thus serving as a model for other “enlightened” industrialists. Pullman believed that a pleasant environment would have an uplifting effect on its inhabitants, and that a well-designed factory town would foster stability and happiness in its workforce. The Town of Pullman eventually included factories, community buildings, and 1,700 residences. Pullman founded an industrial town on undeveloped prairie south of downtown Chicago.
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