This post opens our Big Company, Small Town series, featuring large companies and the small towns in which they are headquartered. Watch for more Big Company, Small Town posts coming soon.

All across this great country of ours, small cities, towns, and villages have been built in the shadows of major companies that supply work for their local populations. It can be a wonderful situation that cultivates a special kind of community and a deep-seated local pride. However, it can also be a recipe for civic disaster, if the major supplier of a wage base in a locality goes out of business or leaves town. Such was the near disastrous fate of Park Falls, Wisconsin, not so long ago.

The city of Park Falls, which is Wisconsin's most geographically isolated city, was built around its paper mill. At its height, the mill helped to bring the population of the city to nearly 4,000 inhabitants. However, in 2006 the paper mill, which was operating at reduced capacity under ownership from out of state, was shut down almost without any prior notice. The result was immediate and deeply wrenching turmoil. Not only had the paper mill workers lost an excellent source of income, but the collateral damage was jarringly significant also. Loggers had no local market for their pulp wood. Dozens of family-feeding log trucks were idled. Private contractors who did various types of work for the mill were left with thousands of dollars worth of unpaid invoices. Local vendors, retailers, and support businesses almost immediately went slack.