American Gypsum Company closes Empire Factory City

The United States Gypsum Company’s closure of Empire turned the loss of a factory into the dismantling of an entire town. In December 2010, workers learned that they had until June to leave the homes their employer owned; within months, the company had sealed the community behind gates. The shutdown exposed how thoroughly Empire’s apparent security depended on one industry—and how completely a corporate decision could undo the lives built around it.

A company town built around the mine

Empire was a factory village of roughly three hundred people on the edge of the Black Rock Desert. One of the last traditional company towns in the United States, it belonged wholly to the United States Gypsum Company, which made the wallboard used in homes across the American West. The town’s identity and its residents’ livelihoods were bound to a mine and plant that transformed gypsum into Sheetrock.

Six miles north of Empire, an open-pit mine occupied the foothills of the Selenite mountain range. Miners used blasts of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil to loosen gypsum from five terraced pits, the largest half a mile across. Haul trucks carried loads of up to sixty tons to the drywall plant, where workers pulverized the stone, heated it to 500 degrees, and formed it into wallboard. The factory’s scale and specialization linked the town to the wider construction economy: when demand for building materials fell, the consequences reached from the production line into every company-owned home.

The company-town arrangement offered residents an unusual degree of everyday stability. Cottages lined four residential streets planted with cottonwoods, elms, and silver poplars. Rent could be as little as $110 for an apartment or $250 for a house, while the company also covered television, sewer, trash, and internet service. Mechanics could earn as much as $22 an hour, and a day or two of work could cover a month’s rent. With relatively low expenses and reliable factory incomes, living paycheck to paycheck seemed remote. Empire appeared to preserve an older promise of industrial employment: a steady job could support a family and make displacement seem unlikely.

That promise had a long local history. Laborers first established a tent colony on the site in 1923; the mine’s claim had been established in 1910. Close quarters also meant close observation: the factory’s maintenance foreman joked that neighbors watched one another whether they wanted them to or not. The same interdependence that made the town feel secure would make the shutdown a collective rupture. The company was not only closing a workplace; it was withdrawing the arrangements that had sustained the community around it.

The shutdown announcement

On December 2, 2010, workers gathered at 7:30 in the morning in the community hall for a mandatory meeting. Wearing steel-toed shoes and hard hats, they heard plant manager Mike Spihlman announce that Empire was closing. Residents were given until June 20 to leave. Silence came first, followed by tears. Workers were released for the day and returned to homes that, though still familiar, would no longer belong to them for long. They had to absorb the news and tell their families that the factory job and the company housing were ending together.

The decision came amid a severe downturn at the company. Valued at $4 billion, the United States Gypsum Company had lost $284 million by the end of the third quarter of 2010. Its chief executive attributed the decline to weak market conditions and low shipping volumes; beneath the corporate language, demand for Empire’s product had fallen. Wallboard manufacturing depended on domestic construction, and the housing-market collapse had prolonged the slump. For Empire, the recession did not merely scar an existing town: the company’s response meant the town itself would disappear.

The end of production became tangible in January 2011, when longtime employee Calvin Ryle stopped the factory line. He had begun work on July 1, 1971, and had served for thirty-nine years and seven months without missing a day or being injured. Because he held the record for continuous service, the honor of stopping the line fell to him. His son also worked at the factory, as a maintenance mechanic. Standing beside a conveyor belt while coworkers watched, Ryle pressed the stop button and wept. The silence marked more than the cessation of machinery: it severed a working life from a place where he had understood his labor as part of building the country and had raised a family while earning a solid living.

Displacement and departure

The shutdown’s consequences were visible beyond the factory. At St. Joseph the Worker, a Catholic mission within sight of the plant, parishioners gathered for one of the last masses. Tom Anderson, a full-time factory electrician with thirty-one years of service, had carved a new wooden church sign and planned to reclaim it before leaving. During the service, a six-year-old girl asked the congregation to pray for people who needed help finding homes and the means to live. Her request gave the closure’s practical meaning a voice: workers were losing not just employment but shelter and the local institutions of daily life.

Physical barriers made the town’s removal from ordinary use visible. Roads at the quarry were blocked with giant gravel berms, and an eight-foot chain-link fence topped with barbed wire rose around Empire. Some residents said it made the place look like a concentration camp. Newly unemployed workers left their construction helmets in a tree across from the post office, turning equipment once worn with pride into a makeshift memorial. The hard hats had functioned as emblems of membership in the company; some were personalized, and workers with more than twenty-five years of service, including Ryle, wore distinctive gold-colored helmets. Their presence in the tree preserved a trace of that identity as the community came apart.

The departing workers did not all find the same route forward. More than a dozen went to work for Barrick Gold Corporation, whose nearby Nevada sites were hiring as gold prices rose. Others struggled. Former supply-chain manager Dan Moran had sent out resumes without receiving an offer and feared he might have to make a living cutting firewood. Monica Baker had returned to Empire from Oahu with two young children after being promised factory work. After the closure, she considered trying for retail work in Fernley rather than taking a job near a toxic leach pond. Her possible move from manufacturing to a chain store captured a larger shift: the old source of dependable local employment had vanished, leaving residents to seek work in other sectors and places.

A town sealed off

The exodus continued through June. After the last families left, the company sealed Empire behind chained gates, security cameras, and no-trespassing signs. The cottages, public pool, two churches, post office, and nine-hole golf course were left to decay. Even the town’s ZIP code, 89405, was expunged. The closure thus proceeded beyond layoffs and relocation: the built environment, public services, and administrative marker of the town were all withdrawn.

The abandoned offices retained small signs of interrupted routines. Unfinished cups of coffee remained on desks, and calendars still showed the shutdown date. To keep weeds down, the company brought in two dozen goats, which roamed the emptied town. Their ordinary task of grazing made the transformation especially stark: a place once maintained for workers and families was now managed as a site to be kept from overgrowing.

Empire also persisted in a different, frozen form. As of 2017, Google Maps Street View still showed Circle Drive as it had appeared in 2009, with parked cars, lawn furniture, and residents watering their yards. The images preserved a populated neighborhood after the physical town had been closed and abandoned. Set against the actual gates and decaying buildings, that unchanged digital street scene made the loss legible as more than an economic statistic: the life of Empire had been captured just before it ended, while the people and institutions that made it a town were gone.