Company Town

So I mentioned that we had a good time up in PA with Bob's family last weekend. We went up for the annual family reunion. We couldn't go last year, so we wanted to make sure we went this year. Also, this was the first opportunity for Bob's parents to meet Faith!

When Melinda and I were talking about when she could come out, this past week was literally the only time that worked, with her schedule, our schedule, when the good fares were, and with her pregnancy. I told her we had already committed to this reunion, and she and Emily were good sports and came along for the ride! Everyone at the reunion was very welcoming, even wanting her to be in the picture!

During the afternon, I was trying to get Faith to go off to sleep, and I asked Melinda if she and Emily would want to go on a walk with Faith and me, as I thought Faith would fall asleep in the stroller. The reunion was again held at a relative's house who lives in the actual small town where Bob's parents grew up and met. I thought it would be fun to walk around and see the town, so I asked Bob where various relatives had lived. He couldn't exactly remember, so he asked his parents. Well, they actually wanted to go with us, so Melinda and I got the first class personal tour of the town, and it was so interesting!

As it turns out, the town, which used to be called "Crow's Nest", was actually a company town, built by the mining company for its miners. As we walked around, Frank and Ann pointed out pretty much every house and told us who used to live in each of them. These houses are not big at all--most of them were duplexes, with 2 bedrooms upstairs, 2 rooms on the main floor, and a basement. People raised huge families in them though! Ann's oldest sister lived in one and raised 10 kids, and Ann's parents lived in one and raised 14!! Wow! I was so impressed! I asked where they all slept, and Ann said they slept sideways on a bed, fitting as many as possible in there.

As we walked around, Ann and Frank looked eagerly in each car that passed, and they knew a lot of the people who drove by! They were children or grandchildren of people they had known growing up. It was funny--Frank commented on how dead and quiet the town was, but I had just been thinking the opposite! Everyone seemed so friendly, waving as they drove by! But Frank meant that people used to just sit on their porches and drop by and visit, and we didn't see much of that. But the town as a whole seemed a lot more friendlier and accessible than the cookie-cutter suburbs developed nowdays, where absolutely no one is out and about, and the garage door goes down as soon as one pulls inside!

Frank and Ann grew up across the street from each other, and a bit catty-corner. Frank said that when Ann would come out every evening to hang laundry on the line behind her house, he would toss a pebble over at her to get her attention. As he was saying this, he tossed a little rock that he had picked up. It was so cute! They reminisced about all the big trees that used to be on the street that they would lay under and look up at the clouds. There weren't very many of the big trees, especially down by their houses. I guess they eventually blew over in storms or something. Poplars, I think they said. Ann said that she fell in love with Frank when she was 12 years old, and she would have married him then. He went off to the war a few years later, where he got injured on a boat. When he came back, she married him anyway, even though he had changed, because she couldn't imagine being with anyone else. After hearing about all their history together, I could better understand that.

We heard all sorts of stories about all these former residents. I asked where they did their shopping, and Ann said at the company store, which we had passed when we drove in. Ahh, that made a lot of sense. She even remembered her tab number--151. When we turned the last corner to go back to Cousin Mark's house, Frank said this was where all the bosses lived. The houses were indeed a bit larger, or they at least weren't duplexes. Interesting.

So we had a fascinating tour of a different era, one where you knew all your neighbors. I'm sure that was not all sweetness and light, and that there were problems associated with that, but it just is so different than it is now that it was fascinating. I mean, I think we live in a very friendly neighborhood and have good relations with our neighbors, but we are only really close to maybe 3-4 families, and we have nodding acquaintances with several more. Our neighborhood is smaller than their town, but we definitely don't even know the faces of all of our neighbors, much less their names!

And they certainly don't build company towns anymore. My aunt and uncle in northern California lived in a company town called Hilt for awhile a long time ago. It was built by I think Sunkist, for its fruit packaging workers. When the company closed the facility, they just shut the town down. No one was allowed to buy the houses they had been living in, and the town just disappeared off the map! How dumb. I remember my cousins (who were in elementary school at the time, I believe) telling about how they wrote letters to company complaining about it, but the company basically just said they were dumb kids and didn't know anything, LOL. Anyways, I was glad that the mining company didn't do that with this town, so that all this family history could be preserved.