Facebook and Amazon are so big they’re creating their own company towns — here’s the 200-year history

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Mega-corporations — from Facebook to Amazon — are creating modern-day company towns.

In Menlo Park, California, Facebook plans to build a new campus with 1,500 residences, a walkable retail district, a grocery store, and a hotel for its employees. Meanwhile, Amazon recently announced that it will build a second headquarters that could effectively turn the chosen city into a company town — much like what happened to Seattle when the online retail giant came to Seattle in the late 1990s. Dubbed HQ2, approximately 50,000 employees will work there.

Since the 19th century, companies have built company towns across the United States — municipalities where they own large percentages of the housing, stores, schools, churches, roads, and parks. In these towns, the corporation is also often the largest employer.

At their peak a century ago, there were more than 2,500 company towns housing 3% of the US population, according to The Economist.

As CityLab notes, many early company towns served as a way for corporations to manage labor relations, since they owned all the homes and could evict strike leaders. More modern company towns, like Hershey, Pennsylvania (named after famed chocolatier Milton Hershey's candy corporation), gave residents say in what the town prioritized.

Since then, the concept of the company town has evolved. Some have similar tactics to early company towns, while other companies build massive headquarters that dominate an existing community's infrastructure and space — and create a new ecosystem of businesses around the swelling employee population.

Take a look at the nearly 200-year evolution of company towns.

Lowell, Massachusetts by the Merrimack Manufacturing Company (1823)

Many historians consider Lowell, Massachusetts to be the first company town in the US.

In the early 19th century, Francis Cabot Lowell — the businessman known for pushing the American industrial revolution forward — established his first textile factory and the Boston Manufacturing Company in Waltham, Massachusetts.

A few years after Lowell's death in 1823, a group of his associates founded the town of Lowell (about 20 miles north of Waltham) in his name and a series of textile mills under a new company name (the Merrimack Manufacturing Company). As Smithsonian notes, they recruited mostly young, single women from rural areas to work in the factories (many of whom participated in strikes due to poor working conditions). The workers lived in boardinghouses and attended church, both built by Merrimack.

By 1836, 18,000 people lived in Lowell. Those employed by Merrimack worked at the textile mills. But by the end of WWII, many of the mills had closed. Today, much of Lowell has transformed into a national historic park and a modern city of over 100,000 residents that, in recent years, has moved toward a post-industrial economy with growing success.

Steinway Village, New York City by Legendary Steinway & Sons pianos (1870)

Much of present-day Astoria, Queens in New York City started as Steinway Village, a company town developed by the piano company Steinway & Sons.

In 1853, German immigrant Henry Steinway started the business in lower Manhattan.

As it grew, Steinway & Sons began to need more space, so in 1870, it started constructing a 400-acre complex, including a foundry, sawmill, an amusement park, library, church, fire house, post office, and housing for its workers (and later, non-employees). The arrangement gave the company a great deal of social control, since Steinway could evict strike leaders from company housing.

Today, the original Steinway factory still exists and produces over 1,000 pianos per year.

Scotia, California by Pacific Lumber Company (1883)

Though Pacific Lumber Company did not found Scotia, California, the company established its headquarters there and maintained all of the town's housing from the early 1880s to the mid-1980s.

Over that time period, the company built 275 homes rented by employees, along with a hotel, post office, several churches, and a shopping center. In 1985, Pacific Lumber's longtime owners sold their business, and a New York hedge fund bought the property.

In 2011, Scotia became a self-governing town, where renters could choose to buy their homes. Three years later, it formed its first city council.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider