Documentary series
Places built by one company, and what happened to them.
Company Town is a documentary YouTube channel about American company towns — settlements where a single company owned the mill, the houses, the store, and the pay.
The channel is published at youtube.com/@company-town. The first episode, on Chester, Pennsylvania, is public.
01Subject
What a company town was
A company town is a place a single company built and owned outright: the housing, the shops, the school, the utilities, often the currency workers were paid in. Some were paternalistic experiments. Some were straightforward instruments of control. Nearly all of them ended — absorbed, abandoned, sold off piece by piece, or drowned by a reservoir.
Each episode takes one such town and follows it from the decision that founded it to whatever is standing there now.
02Episodes
Long-form, narrated, roughly eleven minutes
Episodes are narrated documentaries of about eleven minutes. They are researched from primary and secondary sources — company records, contemporaneous reporting, government documents, and published histories — and written to be watched end to end rather than skimmed.
03Imagery
How historical scenes are shown
Much of what these episodes describe was never photographed, and none of it can be filmed now. Where a historical scene cannot be filmed, the channel uses AI-generated imagery to depict it. Those depictions are reconstructions, not documents.
Episodes carry YouTube’s altered-or-synthetic-content disclosure.
04Channel
Where the work is published
05Tooling
Production software and the YouTube API
Publishing is handled by an internal tool built for this channel and operated by one person. It uploads the channel’s own finished episodes to the channel’s own account through the YouTube Data API, and reads back the metadata and analytics for those same videos.
The tool has no public users, no sign-up, and no third-party accounts. It never touches another person’s YouTube data. What it does access, how long that is kept, and how to have it deleted are set out in the Privacy Policy.
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