A Company Town on Common Waters: Standard Oil in the Calumet

Abstract

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the Standard Oil Company undertook an extraordinary experiment to build a company town in northwest Indiana’s Calumet region. The history of Standard Oil on the Great Lakes shatters the dichotomy between business and government and serves as a cautionary tale of the effects of “free market” environmentalism. The company town, as envisioned by Standard Oil, represented more than just an attempt to set the terms of the company’s social contract with its workers and local government: it was also an aggressive experiment in environmental engineering. Despite attempts by Christine Meisner Rosen to build bridges between environmental and business history by emphasizing an interdisciplinary “industrial ecology,” often business historians fall back on “Chandlerian institutional analysis” of a “neoclassical model of the profit maximizing business manager responding in rational ways to market conditions … that increase the efficiency of firms.” For our part, environmental historians have struggled over whether we have imposed narratives of decline that reflect our cultural desires and fears more than historical reality. At stake is the political question of whether state regulation or free markets best protect ecosystems.