“Stony Island village, Livingstone Channel.” Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress.
In 1908, there was a village on an island, cut off from the world. The island housed a 1000-horsepower generator for electricity and around 500 inhabitants, most of whom worked a grueling schedule to make sure work never stopped. One man, G.P. Locher, supposedly ran this “absolute monarchy” which was also, rather paradoxically, “as nearly a Happyland” as one could imagine.1 Locher saw himself as the community patriarch who took care of workers whilst controlling every aspect of life on the island. This village, Locherville, was laid out deliberately, to prevent workers from “getting about.”2 There was no easy access to the outside world, because Locher controlled all comings and goings. Between 1908 and 1911, Locherville housed laborers working on the dry section of the Livingstone Channel. Located a few thousand feet from the biggest island in the Detroit River, Grosse Ile, Locherville was a unique social and spatial experiment, a pop-up town that sprang up and disappeared based on dredging and construction patterns.
Map of Detroit River waterway. All maps created by the author.
The Detroit River, in the 19th century, was one of the busiest waterways in the world, handling more shipping traffic than even New York. Yet the lower part of the river near its mouth into Lake Erie offered a narrow shipping channel. Wedged between the Canadian shore and an island, the channel offered little room for expansion. By the early 20th century, as shipping interests lobbied for a wider, deeper, and safer channel, there was no choice but to construct a wholly new channel—the Livingstone Channel—that would handle unidirectional traffic going down to the Atlantic. The channel would be constructed in distinct sections, allowing different contractors to work simultaneously. Locherville’s establishment supported the construction of a “dry section” which was possible because dams were holding back the river and pumps had driven the river out, laying bare the riverbed. This section would transform relatively shallow waters into a channel 22-25 feet deep “under normal conditions.”3
Locherville wasn’t another company town. The company constructing the dry section of the channel, Grant, Smith Co., and Locher, put one of the Locher brothers, G.P. Locher, in charge of getting the village up and running. Locherville wasn’t the first of its kind that the Lochers had built. They had built a similar town during construction of the West Neebish channel in the St. Mary’s River and some of the workers in Locherville had come from this previous construction project.4
“Steam shovel, Livingstone Channel, Stony Island.” Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress.
There is a long history of company towns supporting a specific type of industry.5 Growing in the Northeast, these towns were often built in river valleys and slowly grew in Piedmont and the West. They were “designed for low-income workers [and] provided a timely alternative to large industrial cities and projected an image of responsible design.”6 While different in structure and appearance, company towns did share some commonalities. For instance, “bunkhouses often were separated from family houses, and manager’s homes often were built atop hills or on larger lots.”7 Company towns often consisted of temporary houses until permanent structures could be built. The spatial configuration of company towns was also dependent on immigrant workers. In the coal camps in southern Colorado’s Las Animas and Huerfano counties, the best housing went to Anglo-Americans and northern Europeans, while everyone else lived in designated areas.8 Sometimes, company towns followed the company into remote areas, as in the case of Fordlandia. Built in Brazil, Fordlandia was a means to get raw materials and groom workers into supposedly better people.9
Map of Grosse Ile and the surrounding islands.
The concept of company towns, however, leaves out a variety of socioenvironmental arrangements and conditions such as work camps, mill villages, and communitarian settlements, which are often folded into the former spatial form. Mill villages, common in the early 19th century, were located close to sources of energy.10 Work camps were often mostly full of male workers, close to mining, logging and extractive sites. These were temporary and isolated barracks. Industrial communitarian settlements differed from the other two in that they were “utopian experiences of social and labor organization” in the early 19th century, “a result of the influence of the ideas of thinkers like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen.”11
“Livingstone Channel.” Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress.
Locherville, however, was unlike these arrangements. Yes, this was a company-sponsored and built town. But the very premise of the town and the work itself was migratory, much like its workers. Dredging contracts were short and location-specific, especially when it came to projects like the Livingstone Channel that carved a wholly manmade channel over twenty feet deep where the water depth used to be between four and fifteen feet. Much like mill-towns, these were premised on resource extraction but in an impermanent way. The migratory nature of the work had an inevitable effect on design. The village’s design and construction had to be nimble so it could be packed up and moved. Buildings were often multi-purpose. For instance, the multi-functional single-room school building which was one of the first buildings erected in the village. During the day, children learned from a teacher that the Lochers’ had hired to be on site. During the evenings and weekends, it often doubled up as a ballroom and social epicenter when the easily removable desks and chairs were stacked to the back. There was even a platform for musicians, dressing rooms, and lights installed. On Sundays, the school building transformed once more into the island’s church.12
The entire village layout centered around one main street. Along one side of the street were offices, a general store, a boarding house, a general dining room and quarters for the single foreigners (according to the newspaper, most of these were Italians). South of this, amongst a cluster of trees, were houses for Italian migrant families. Across the village’s main street lived American workmen and skilled mechanics, their homes nestled in an oak grove. A walk went along the porch from the front door of the house to the sand roadway. At a “convenient spot” on each boardwalk, a sand scraper rested so mud wouldn’t enter the houses along with shoes. These houses are roomy, “even the foreign quarters being far better than their occupants would be able to afford in a city.”13
Race was another filter that governed design choices. Foreign-born workers and American “skilled” workers lived not just across the main street from one another, but also led different social lives. This was, according to newspapers, “to the satisfaction of all” because when the Americans on the island were having a party, the foreigners would be absent, “amusing themselves in the way peculiar to their nationality.”14 There were music players in “both colonies” for these dances which were “orderly” and “thoroughly enjoyable.” There were other “diversions” such as concerts, card parties, and “social gatherings graced by the elite of the island.”15
“Livingstone Channel.” Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection, Library of Congress.
Design choices also were governed by what the Lochers’ didn’t want happening. It was only a few hundred feet from the largest island in the Detroit River, Grosse Ile, but still cut off from it.16 In the late 19th century there was a bridge from Stony Island to Grosse Ile and a rail line where the railcars of the Canada Southern Railroad crossed the river from Amherstburg, Canada on a ferry. However, as soon as Michigan Central leased Canada Southern, the island rail line, bridge, and car ferry set up were quickly abandoned, and traffic diverted for their railcar ferries in upstream Windsor.
Grosse Ile residents were not pleased at the announcement of Locherville. This was a township that prided itself on its exclusivity (and still does). According to the rumor mill, the old bridge would be rebuilt. The thought of workers from Locherville setting foot on Grosse Ile caused much consternation amongst the latter’s residents. But Mr. Locher never planned on building this bridge because he could not take a chance on his “people spoiled by getting over to Grosse Ile.” Despite its isolation, the island community was supposedly happy and content.17
Locherville was quickly dismantled after the completion of dry works construction. Locher and his town were ready to move to New York where the company assisted in the construction of the Catskill aqueduct that supplied water to New York City.18 Today, if you look at a map of Stony Island, you will notice the barriers around the island and ramparts of the dry works to build the Livingstone Channel. Zoom in and you will begin to see submerged boats and the remnants of the old railroad across the breadth of the island. You would be hard-pressed to find any information on the island’s unique form. Most websites will tell you that it is uninhabited. Few will talk about Locherville, an experiment in a mobile urban agglomeration born out of a moment when operations moved depending on the work. We don’t often think about these moments and what they might tell us about urban history, environmental history, and immigration history. Perhaps it is time we do.
- “Where Life Is Joy,” Detroit Free Press, April 3, 1910.
- “Conquering Lime Kiln Crossing,” Detroit Free Press, Oct. 18, 1908.
- Ibid.
- “Will Erect a Village,” Detroit Free Press, March 31, 1908, Marine News section.
- Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London: Verso, 1995).
- John S. Garner, The Model Company Town: Urban Design through Private Enterprise in Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984), 10.
- Linda Carlson, Company Towns of the Pacific Northwest (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 15.
- Rick Clyne, Coal People: Life in Southern Colorado’s Company Towns, 1890–1930 (Denver: Colorado Historical Society, 1999), 46.
- Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
- Marcelo J. Borges and Susana B. Torres, “Company Towns: Concepts, Historiography, and Approaches,” in Borges and Torres, eds., Company Towns: Labor, Space, and Power Relations across Time and Continents (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 1–40.
- Borges and Torres, “Company Towns,” 6.
- “Exit Locherville,” Detroit Free Press, Dec. 17, 1911.
- “Conquering Lime Kiln Crossing,” Detroit Free Press, Oct. 18, 1908.
- Ibid.
- “Where Life Is Joy,” Detroit Free Press, April 3, 1910.
- Grosse Ile is the largest island in the Detroit River. Grosse Ile township consists of twelve islands—both inhabited and uninhabited—including Grosse Ile.
- “Where Life Is Joy,” Detroit Free Press, April 3, 1910.
- Lazarus White, The Catskill Water Supply of New York City: History, Location, Sub-Surface Investigations and Construction (New York: Wiley, 1913).
