Company Town : Part of Past Works Well in Scotia

Main Street in this compact little logging community looks a lot like the business district of any other small American town, except that it seems a bit neater than most.

The wide, well-kept roadway is flanked by twin banks of tidy businesses and bisected by the town’s only crosswalk, which is staffed twice a day by pairs of student crossing guards.

There are no traffic lights, and no need for them.

But there is something unusual about Scotia, something as old-fashioned and uniquely American as the elegant, old Scotia Inn at one end of town.

Scotia is a complete, nearly self-sufficient company town--100 years old and owned lock, stock and Crocker Bank building by the Pacific Lumber Co. of San Francisco for the comfort and convenience of its millworkers.

Part of American Scene

Company towns such as Scotia, in which virtually every building and all the land is owned and run by the major local employer, were once a familiar--and sometimes unsavory--part of the American scene.

Today, they are rare and growing rarer still.

Company towns originally sprang up next to textile mills in the South, coal mines in Appalachia, lumber mills in the West, even pineapple farms in Hawaii. For workers, they offered housing where none existed; for companies, they were a reliable source of labor.

These company towns are distinct from small communities--such as Hershey, Pa., and Kohler, Wis.--which often grew up next to and wholly dependent on a single firm. Unlike company towns, these communities were subdivided and owned by the local residents and had independent local governments.

Company towns were different, too, from labor camps, such as those found in the southwestern United States for use by immigrant guest workers from Mexico. These camps offered few, if any, amenities such as supermarkets or banks or nickel-and-dime variety stores.

Own Currencies

The factory-run company towns, usually found in poor, isolated parts of the country, had not only company-owned houses and company-owned stores, but often company-issued currencies--and sometimes company-dictated laws. Occasionally, such towns were used to exploit the people who lived in them.

Many company towns were either closed or sold to their residents after World War II. Companies were by then uncomfortable with the bad reputation the towns had acquired, and workers were restless about their employers’ influence on all aspects of their lives.

A number of company towns are still around, however.

Castle & Cooke Inc., for example, actually runs its own “company island” in Hawaii. The island, Lanai, is “99% owned” by the San Francisco company, spokeswoman Barbara Shirkey said. All commercial buildings and 250 of the 800 homes also belong to the firm, which grows pineapples on the island.

Perhaps the largest company town in the country, Kannapolis, N.C., with its 37,000 residents, recently severed most of its relationship with Cannon Mills, the giant textile company that built the town 76 years ago.

As part of a financial reorganization, Cannon sold all 1,785 clapboard millworkers houses. The mill held on to its valuable commercial property, but that property is now governed by Kannapolis’ first elected city government.

In California, Scotia is the only company town still licensed by the state Department of Housing and Community Development. Its final company-town rival in the state, Eagle Mountain, 50 miles east of Palm Springs, closed in 1983. Eagle Mountain was owned by Kaiser Steel for its Eagle Mountain Mine workers.

Scotia, too, was rumored to be in danger when Pacific Lumber Co. was bought late last year by Maxxam Group, but Pacific Lumber officials say the new owner plans to keep the town essentially as it is.

That was good news to the 975 residents of Scotia. Indeed, if they are any indication, people living in present-day company towns are happy to do so, although lingering concerns about the takeover of the company made it difficult for them to discuss it openly.

Happy Residents

“My husband was born here, raised here, lives here and works here--and he says he’s glad about all of it,” one Scotia woman said. She declined to give her name, but said she lived in town for 11 years in three different houses--moving to a bigger one with each new baby.

“I like it here, too,” she said. “I like raising my children here. It’s a good environment. It’s safe; there is no crime.”

There is, however, a full-time Humboldt County sheriff’s deputy who lives in town, one of several services provided by the company.

There is also a collection of recreational facilities and groups--social club, softball league, basketball courts, swimming pool, weight room and the Boy Scout Hall.

Shops include a supermarket, pharmacy, hardware store and hobby shop. There is the Coffee Cup cafe for casual dining, and across Main street a fine restaurant in the Scotia Inn. Services include the Crocker Bank branch, a beauty shop, insurance agency, two doctors and a dentist.

There are two churches and one school, which goes from kindergarten through the eighth grade. High school students attend either a public school in nearby Fortuna or a Catholic school in Eureka, 20 miles away.

The company generates all of its own electricity--for its twin mills and for the town--and meets its own water and sewage-disposal needs. Outside concerns are called on only for telephone, gas and cable television services.

Workers’ houses are pleasant, wood-frame dwellings, usually only one story, but ranging from two to four bedrooms in size. Rents are low, running between $120 and $200 a month. However, company officials plan to raise them soon.

Small but Well-Maintained

“Some of them, frankly, are pretty small,” company spokesman David Galitz said of the trim little houses, which generations of owners have customized by adding gardens, decks or other personal touches. “But most are very nice, and all of them are well-maintained.”

Indeed, Galitz said the company has a cadre of carpenters, electricians and plumbers to keep both the mill and the town in shape. He said there is a nine-month waiting list for Scotia houses. Only company employees, the fire chief, the sheriff’s deputy and shopkeepers are allowed to live in town.

“People really like living here,” said Stanley Parker, a recently retired Pacific Lumber executive. “They think of it as another fringe benefit.”

At first, the town was christened Forestville, company executive Rod Wooley recalled, but he said the name was dropped when people learned that it already had been taken by a settlement in Sonoma County, 150 miles south.

Residents settled on the name Scotia, most here believe, because so many of the original inhabitants came from Nova Scotia.

In any case, the town can trace its history back to the construction of the original mill a full century ago in 1886, said Parker, the retired executive who is also the local historian.

“There was literally nothing around,” Parker explained. “That first mill was the only thing between Eureka and Willits (a deep-sea port and a rail head 100 miles apart), so they had to build some housing. It was 1880s housing, you know, and not very adequate.”

Major Fire

No matter. Part of the town burned down along with that first mill and some warehouses in 1895. Much of that damage occurred while the town waited for the arrival of the nearest organized firefighters, from Eureka, 20 rugged miles to the north.

The lesson was not lost on company executives. The town organized and still operates its own volunteer Fire Department administered by a full-time veteran chief and equipped with modern firefighting tools.

A new mill--the largest redwood mill in the world at the time--sprouted a year later, in 1896. The shell of that mill still stands today, although the original saws and other equipment have been replaced by the latest high-tech, fully automated machinery.

The original mill was “kept as simple as possible,” Parker said--and for good reason.

“You just couldn’t have an operation where you would have to shut down for two weeks waiting for a cotter key made in Minnesota,” he said. “After all, this was a day’s trip out of Eureka; Eureka was three days from San Francisco, and San Francisco in those days was a long way from anywhere, too.

“You needed a simple operation and you needed people right there who could fix it.”

The desire for speedy equipment repairs is the major reason for keeping the town a company town today, Galitz said.

Benefit to Firm

“In that sense, the town serves as a benefit to the company as much as to the employees,” he said. “If we have a piece of equipment that goes down, we can’t call an engineer in Eureka and have him arrive two hours later.

“It’s good business (to keep the town); it makes good sense.”

As the first mill was rebuilt in 1896, the company also put up a mercantile and medical center along Main Street to serve not only the town but pioneers and settlers who had yet to fully tame the state’s redwood forest.

“Scotia was the jumping-off point, if you will, for that great undeveloped area south of here,” Parker said.

Over the next decade or so, the town built a second mill, added stores and put up a fully equipped hospital (which was closed in 1958). But the real growth in Scotia did not occur until the arrival of the railroad down to San Francisco.

No longer burdened with sending lumber by train to the steamships at Eureka for the long trip south, the company increased production--and added workers. Most of the houses used today were built between 1915 and 1925, Parker said.

In 1920, he added, Scotia was at its zenith, with 320 homes and bunkhouses. Also about that time, the company built the two finest commercial buildings in town, the Bank of Scotia building and the theater. Both structures, with their rough-hewn elegance, stand today.

The rest of the shopping district was rebuilt in the 1940s and ‘50s, Parker said. At that time, the company invited independent businessmen and bankers to Scotia.

Problems of Image

“The company stores were not particularly profitable, and not particularly good for the image,” Parker said. “You know that old song, ‘I owe my soul to the company store. . . .’

“Although,” he added with a smile, “I doubt the company wanted anyone’s soul; they would rather have had cash.”

For many years, until the hotel opened a bar in the 1940s, Scotia was a dry town. Tired, thirsty mill hands had to cross the Eel River to the town of Rio Dell, which at one time boasted 23 saloons within three blocks.

The “Whiskey Special” train each Saturday would haul workers to the rowdy, bawdy bars and brothels on 2nd Street in Eureka, the local version of San Francisco’s legendary Barbary Coast.

“It returned that same night,” Parker said, “with whoever could make it back to the train.”

However, such exploits were hardly typical of the town, Parker said. Scotia encouraged family life early on, in contrast to the rougher, single-men-only lumber camps huddled elsewhere in the woods. From its earliest days, he said, Scotia had two well-attended churches, Protestant and Catholic.

Since those days, the construction of highways and the advent of television, as well as other advances, have had an effect on Scotia and its inhabitants, Galitz said, causing it to lose some of its naivete, as well as its rough edges.

“The town has changed tremendously, just as everything else has,” he said. “But there’s a certain part of it, a small-town neighborliness, I guess, that is the same now as it was 50 years ago.”