City of Dust: A Cement Company Town in the Land of Tom Sawyer
\ Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the Mississippi River. In City of Dust, Gregg Andrews tells another story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri, an industrial town created to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement Company.\ In this new edition,...
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Mark Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, often brings to mind romanticized images of Twain's fictional characters Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer exploring caves and fishing from the banks of the Mississippi River. In City of Dust, Gregg Andrews tells another story of the Hannibal area, the very real story of the exploitation and eventual destruction of Ilasco, Missouri, an industrial town created to serve the purposes of the Atlas Portland Cement Company.In this new edition, Andrews provides an introduction detailing the impact of this book since its initial publication in 1996. He writes of a new twist in the Ilasco saga, one that concerns the Continental Cement Company’s attempt, not unlike Atlas’s one hundred years earlier, to manipulate the sale of a piece of land near its plant in the town. He explores the uneasy relationship between preservationists and the plant’s CEO and officials in St. Louis; the growing movement to preserve Ilasco’s heritage, including the building of a monument to commemorate the early residents of the town; and the grassroots petition drive and letter-writing campaign that stopped the Continental Cement Company’s machinations.
AcknowledgmentsixNew IntroductionxiiiIntroduction1Part IA Foreign Colony in Mossback Missouri1.From Robber Caves to Robber Barons: Atlas Portland Cement and the Transformation of Mark Twain's Boyhood Playground72.Woodchopper Landlords and Cement Mill Tenants: The Social Origins of Ilasco233.A Labor Camp in the Shadow of Atlas404.The Wages of Cement635.The Militia Comes to Town: Labor Unrest and the Strike of 191085Part IIWhose Community?6.Extending the Control of Old Man Atlas, 1910-19301097.Schools and Churches1338.Company Patriotism and the War on Booze, Blacks, and Immigrants, 1910-19302069.The Culture of Cement and the Forging of an Identity228Part IIIDust to Dust Big Business, the State, and the Destruction of Ilasco10.New Landlord on the Block: The United States Steel Corporation, "Imperfect Collusion," and Depression-Era Ilasco25711.Gypsies Come to Town: A Union at Last27512.Ilasco and the Commercial Construction of Mark Twain29013.Render unto Atlas: The War on Community and Labor305Epilogue: Whose History? Whose Mark Twain?323Bibliography329Index347
\ From the Publisher"Gregg Andrews provides a fascinating story. . . . [His] account of Ilasco emerges as a model of capturing the personal lives and public events of a working-class community. He profiles representative figures, recounts cultural patterns, explicates the company's economic and labor policies, surveys workplace conditions, and weaves those local insights into the larger framework of the national scene and the entire cement industry. Finally, he enlivens his narrative with vivid quotes. . . . City of Dust stands as a remarkable achievement."—llinois Historical Journal\ \ \
