Kohler

Wisconsin. Kohler Company, developer. Olmsted Brothers, landscape architects. Richard Philipp, architect. 1913

Kohler was built by the well-known plumbing manufacturers on the Sheboygan River in Wisconsin. Although the company first moved to the site around the turn of the century, it was not until several years later when the architect Richard Philipp, partner in the Milwaukee firm of Brust & Philipp, accompanied Wisconsin's Governor Walter J Kohler on a tour of the 'garden cities' of Europe and America that serious plans were made for the founding of a model village on the site.¹ The Olmsted Brothers were hired as landscape architects, apparently after some problem had developed with the plans of Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets, the authors of *Civic Art*.²

Olmsted's design took advantage of a natural ravine to introduce a continuous park running alongside the centre of the town from the school to the river. Commercial and institutional buildings were located to the east, between the park and the factory: the most unusual of these was the American Club, a residence for single men maintained by the company across from the plant. The houses on the shady streets of Kohler were built by the Kohler Improvement Company, a non-profit development company that sold houses and the land at cost and arranged financing. Built with a solid burgher charm which we are coming to appreciate again, they help to dispel some of the associations that often accompany the phrase 'company town'.

Notes

1. L L Smith, 'The Industrial Garden City of Kohler, Wisconsin', *American Landscape Architect* 3, September 1930, pp 11-18.

2. John W Reps states that Hegemann & Peet were the original planners of Kohler, in *The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in America*, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1965, p 430.

1

2

3

1. Plot plan of 1913

2. Brust and Philip, American Club, residence for single men, c 1915

3. Brust and Philip, Lincoln Circle, c 1915

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# Tyrone

## New Mexico. Phelps-Dodge Corporation, developers. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, architect. 1915

Tyrone, the grandest copper-mining town ever built, was designed by Bertram Goodhue for the Phelps-Dodge Corporation. Cupped in the Burro Mountains, Tyrone was notable for its combination of City Beautiful and Romantic Naturalist planning techniques with the Spanish-American architecture gaining popularity in the west after the success of Goodhue's work at the Panama-California Exhibition in San Diego.

The style was appropriate for a company town near the Mexican border that employed many Mexican workmen, although the Mexican labourers were housed in their own quarter removed from the executives' and bureaucrats' houses. The principal feature of Goodhue's design was the central square or plaza bounded by the railroad station and post office, the company store, the company headquarters, and a fourth building containing a bank, shops, and a library. All the buildings had arcades on the plaza, except for the company headquarters occupying the place of honour usually reserved in such a plan for the town hall. The rest of the plaza was never completed; even unfinished, however, the quality of its design and construction distinguished Tyrone from other mining towns. Many years later several of the miners fondly remembered the dances held under Chinese lanterns hung in the plaza.¹

Other features of the town were equally ambitious: the company store opposite the headquarters was known as the 'Wanamaker's of the west'; the hospital, said to be the best between Kansas City and San Francisco, had private phones in every room and a number of sunken bathtubs.² The workmen's houses were model designs for the time, though they couldn't compare to the free-standing houses on the curving streets of the exclusive residential section.

Tyrone was built in two stages, from 1915 to 1916 and 1916 to 1917. In the first stage the workers' houses employed so-called 'old style' motifs (pitched tile roofs), but in the second stage 'new style' flat-roofed cottages were introduced for variety and perhaps to save money.³ The plan was never completed, however, and Phelps-Dodge stopped operations in 1921 when copper prices sank as rapidly as they had risen during the war. The workers offered to take a 25 per cent pay cut, but even so Tyrone's ore was too low a grade to be profitable. Over the next four decades workers periodically opened the mines in anticipation of higher prices, a dude ranch was opened, and occasional artists and writers moved into the vacant houses. But over the years the workmen's cottages, the ware-

house, and the school were torn down, and the railroad station, the store and the hospital were fenced off behind barbed wire. Finally in 1966 Phelps-Dodge announced it would reopen the mines as open-pit mines where the town stood. The company demolished the town in 1967.⁴

Though little known, Tyrone may have had a major impact on suburban design: Clarence Stein was in charge of the project when he worked in Goodhue's office and was undoubtedly influenced by it in his later work, including the Canadian mining town of Kitimat, British Columbia, built by Alcan in the 1950s.⁵ Another Phelps-Dodge mining town in Spanish-American style still thrives: Ajo, Arizona

designed in 1917 by William M Kenyon and Maurice F Maine.

### Notes

1. Robert B Riley, 'Gone Forever, Goodhue's Ghost Town', *AIA Journal* 50, August 1968, pp 67–70.

2. Riley, *op cit*, pp 69–70.

3. 'The New Mining Community of Tyrone, NM, Now Building for the Burro Mountain Branch of the Phelps-Dodge Corporation', *Architectural Review* 23 os, April 1918, pp 59–62, plates LIII–LVII.

4. Riley, *op cit*, p 70.

5. Lewis Mumford, 'A Modest Man's Enduring Contributions to Urban and Regional Planning', *AIA Journal*, December 1976, pp 19–28. For a description of Kitimat see 'Kitimat, A New Town Prototype', *Architectural Forum* 101, August 1954, pp 128–147.

6. 'Ajo, Arizona', *Architecture* 39, January 1919, plates XI–XV.

1, 2 Central Square as projected, 1915, perspective and plan

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217. Roanoke Rapids, N. C., plan (L. M. Roth). The symbol ■ represents position of original "turtle-top" houses.

218. "Turtle-top" house, 1st and Hamilton Streets, Roanoke Rapids, N. C., 1894-95.

Columbus
Kentucky

General Plan
for
The New Location
1927

Prepared For
The AMERICAN
R&D CROSS
and
The CITY Of
COLUMBUS

Lawrence V. Shertidan
City Planner
Indianapolis

Graphic Scale
80 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450 500 550 600

Lowell

Massachusetts Boston Manufacturing Company, developer. Kirk Boott, planner. 1822

Lowell is a company town that set the precedent for many of the industrial villages. Planned in 1822 by the treasurer of the Boston Manufacturing Company, Kirk Boott, the textile community was apparently designed to the principles of the company's founder, Francis Cabot Lowell, who had died in 1817.¹ Like other Yankee mill owners, Lowell had been concerned about the welfare of the young women who came to work in the new factories, and he had built boarding-houses run by matrons of impeccable reputation. Lowell's female loom operators at Waltham and the women at other mill towns had compulsory Bible classes and church attendance, in an atmosphere that must have been somewhat like a convent.

The rapid growth of the small New England villages meant that the companies had to supply commercial as well as spiritual facilities for their enterprises to succeed. Lowell devised an ideal town plan to cope with these conditions, but it was not until the Boston

Manufacturing Company's original plant became too small and the company purchased a new site on the Merrimack River that the ideas were put into use. Modifying Francis Lowell's ideal grid to existing site conditions, Boott built a factory complex grouped along the river in a shady quadrangle resembling a New England campus. The boarding-houses were nearby in tidy rows of quadruple and double houses. At least one foreign visitor came away impressed by Lowell's character: 'The town of Lowell ... is a pile of huge factories, each five, six, or seven stories high, and capped with a little white belfry.... By the side of these larger structures rise numerous little wooden houses painted white, with green blinds, very neat, very snug, very nicely carpeted, and with a few small trees around them, or brick houses in the English style.... Here are all edifices of a flourishing town in the Old World, except the prisons, hospitals, and theatres.'²

Later mills to the south and east for the

Appleton and Hamilton Manufacturing companies had less orderly developments. But the tradition of model housing in the area persisted right up to the early 20th century, when the Massachusetts Homestead Commission, a state organisation, built a small development designed by Kilham & Hopkins, architects of the Emergency Fleet Corporation's Atlantic Heights project in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.³ After World War II the textile mills went south in search of cheaper labour and the town declined, but today Lowell is prosperous again.⁴

Notes

1 John Coolidge, *Mill and Mansion: A Study of Architecture and Society in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1820-1865*, Columbia University Press, New York 1942. The major work on Lowell, with a complete bibliography.

2 Michel Chevalier, *Society, Manners and Politics in the United States, Boston 1839*, pp 128-129.

3 'The Workingman and His House', *Architectural Record* 44, October 1918, pp 302-325.

4 Michael Knight, 'Once-Blighted Cities of New England are Booming', *New York Times*, January 22 1980, A-1.

1 1832 plan

2 Lowell from across Merrimack River, 1833

3 Typical boarding houses of the 1830s

4 Engraving of Dutton Street in 1849

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