Privately Owned Cities/Towns

I remember reading that privately owned miner towns were run as de facto military-style dictatorships, with strict discipline and rigid maintenance of rules enforced on the residents of such private towns by private militias. However, I believe I read this on an anarchist blog so it may be biased.

I tried googling, but I couldn't find anything. Does someone have a credible source on how privately owned towns operated?

Really I'm suprized you couldn't find anything. Try searching "Company town" which is what they are usually called.

Check out the movie "Matewan" for a historical-fiction representation of a company town.

"Grapes of Wrath" talks about company-run farm-worker camps and how labor was kept in debt and beholden to the company.

I recently read the book "The Lean Years" which is by a non-marxist historian (he was a liberal FDR supporter) and the first section is all about organizing mining towns in the 1920s. It goes into a lot of detail about what life was like anecdotally, but also goes through lots of statistics to show what aspects were fairly common in these towns. Very vivid and gives an excellent sense of what it was like for workers and how these towns functioned.

"The Bending Cross" about Eugene Debs' life also gives an account of a labor battle in a company town - many of their greviences were not directly about work but about conditions in the town.

EDIT: "Company Town" has an entry on wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town

Here's a list of former company owned towns in the US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._United_States

(It's from Wikipedia, but I'm sure it is adequate.)

From what I heard those towns were terrible. You worked fro the company, you got paid in "money" you could only spend in the town, and everything that was owned by the company. Meaning they could regulate prices as they pleased in order to persuade workers to comply with their policies.