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

Reviewed by: Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan's Mining Frontier by Sarah Fayen Scarlett Emily Paige Taylor Company Suburbs: Architecture, Power, and the Transformation of Michigan's Mining Frontier By Sarah Fayen Scarlett (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 291. Notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $55.00; e-book, $55.00.) The Keweenaw Peninsula is a small limb of land on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The area is known as Michigan's "Copper Country," along with the neighboring counties of Houghton, Baraga, and Ontonagon. Though this region is easily overlooked on maps, its size made it the perfect case study for Sarah Fayen Scarlett to compare with national trends of the development of suburbs and industrial communities. In this monograph, Fayen Scarlett examines the company suburbs which emerged in Michigan's Copper Country from 1875 to 1920 and how residents navigated relationships among people, power, and the built environment. The primacy of the copper industry's land claims forced active industry, company housing, and elite suburban houses into close quarters. This combination of the older traditional, paternalistic mining town with newer elite, modern suburbs gave rise to a fascinating variation on the American company town that Fayen Scarlet dubs "the company suburb." The author challenges the assumption that company towns and suburbs are the result of separate historical forces and questions their continued separation in historical scholarship. Company Suburbs is organized thematically with an introduction, epilogue, and six chapters that are divided between two analytical approaches. The introduction opens with discussion of the Western Federation of Miners (WFM) strike in 1914. The strike serves as a narrative climax for the period Fayan Scarlett covers, but she makes a good call placing it in the introduction. Her examination of the rival language used by the company and strikers to stake their claim on Copper Country demonstrates the [End Page 167] depth of the social divide between the miners who lived in the old company town and the middle-class and wealthy residents of the suburb. The striking miners and other working-class residents painted the mining management as "absentee exploiters" while the suburban elite framed strikers as "alien officers" and "hired agitators" (p. 2). The first four chapters examine "how companies and residents used architecture and neighborhoods to navigate between company identity and class identity" in the East Houghton and Quincy Addition neighborhoods (p. 23). The final two chapters examine the "embodied experience and sense of place" of the people who lived and worked in these neighborhoods as well as how they lived within—and challenged—the social hierarchies that the built environment reflected and reproduced (p. 23). Chapter five is particularly remarkable, as it examines the lived experiences of the women who worked as domestic servants in the elite neighborhoods only streets away from the company housing and downtown apartment buildings of their own communities. These women navigated the overlapping social landscapes comprised by the private and public areas of suburban homes whose architecture "required them to perform their specific identities as 'servant' and/or 'worker'" (p. 162). This chapter shows that the social divide demonstrated in the language of the 1914 WFM strike extended far beyond the mines. One of the primary strengths of this book is that Fayen Scarlett draws on a diversity of disciplines including the work of geographers, anthropologists, sociologists, and philosophers as well as scholarship from the sub-disciplines of art history, architectural history, labor history, gender history, economic history, and urban history. She uses this wide base of scholarship in conjunction with a rich set of primary sources to explore Copper Country's "overlapping landscapes of social difference" (p. 14). Overall, Company Suburbs is a brilliantly written contribution to the literature on company towns and suburbs and successfully complicates the relationship between them. Other scholars should take cues from Fayen Scarlett's use of space and movement in studies of the built environment. [End Page 168]