A company town

Luke is a survivor of an era when blue-collar jobs were plentiful in rural America. The mill told workers where to live and provided the steam that heated their homes. For years, employees were paid in marks they could use at the company store.

Audrey Nolan, 104, immigrated with her parents from Spain and settled in Luke in 1921. “We belonged to the mill,” she says.

In its heyday, which lasted into the 1950s, the mill employed more than 2,000 people. Most of them lived in what are known as the Tri-Towns — Luke and Westernport in Maryland and Piedmont just over the river in West Virginia. Some were descendants of Hessians, the mercenaries who fought for the British in the Revolutionary War. Others were recent immigrants from Italy or Spain.

Families assumed that sons would join their fathers in the paper-making business. Fazenbaker was one of the early family names in the mill, local historian Patrick McCarty is proud to say — it’s his mother’s maiden name. He would have joined the three generations before him had his father not insisted he go to college and work in a profession other than making paper.

The mill community was like a family, McCarty said, making the Tri-Towns a cross between a company town and Mayberry. It was a place where McCarty could wander from the top of Westernport Hill across a bridge over the rocky Potomac to the top of Piedmont Hill by himself at age 6. “It was the most wonderful place in the world to grow up,” the retired school principal says.

But longtime residents of the Tri-Towns also remember when their surroundings weren’t so beautiful. They remember how the steep slope across the Potomac from the mill was barren, stripped for lumber and too choked by pollution to recover. The river itself was opaque.

“You could not see the water,” McCarty remembers of the 1940s and ’50s. The floes of black liquor and other waste from the mill “looked like icebergs,” he says — icebergs that reeked of the rotten-egg, cooked-cabbage scent for which the mill is still known.

It was an uncomfortable part of life in a mill town, Nolan recalls. When black liquor would spill into the Potomac, she says, you 11 didn’t talk about it at the pulp mill.