company town

noun

Updated on: 21 Apr 2018

Definition of company town

: a community that is dependent on one firm for all or most of the necessary services or functions of town life (such as employment, housing, and stores)

Recent Examples of company town from the Web

At its zenith, 600 miners lived in this company town, eventually digging 70 miles of tunnels in the mountain above the mill.

— nathaniel wilder, Smithsonian, "A Daring Journey Into the Big Unknown of America’s Largest National Park," 18 Apr. 2018
Railroad car magnate George Pullman built a company town for his employees south of Chicago in the early 1890s.

— robert mitchell, Washington Post, "Andrew Carnegie built 1,700 public libraries. But some towns refused the steel baron’s money.," 9 Apr. 2018
Twenty six years after his death, what was once a sleepy company town has become a mecca for luxury-home buyers.

— wsj real estate, WSJ, "Bronfman Scion Sells Bel-Air Manse for $85 Million," 8 Mar. 2018
Lost Hills is now the ultimate company town; everything is branded.

— aaron gilbreath, Longreads, "It’s a Wonderful World: The Remaking of California Agriculture," 26 Feb. 2017
Moccasin is what’s known as a company town, where almost all of the homes are owned by the city and county of San Francisco, operated to supply housing for workers on the city’s Hetch Hetchy Project.

— bill van niekerken, San Francisco Chronicle, "Hetch Hetchy water’s long trip from Sierra to San Francisco," 6 Mar. 2018
Aetna formerly housed an explosives manufacturer, the Aetna Powder Co., and was a company town that predated Gary's 1906 incorporation by 25 years.

— gregory tejeda, Post-Tribune, "Gary's Aetna neighborhood gets revitalization ball rolling," 23 Feb. 2018
This would represent the very essence of a company town.

— nathan bomey, USA TODAY, "4 wildest stunts for Amazon's second headquarters: Cities compete for 50,000 jobs," 18 Oct. 2017
Growing up in a steel town amid segregation U.S. Steel established Fairfield, Ala., as a company town in the early 1910s.

— brian lyman, USA TODAY, "Who is Doug Jones? Civil Rights activist, attorney and University of Alabama alumni," 13 Dec. 2017

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'company town.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.