Facebook and Amazon are so big they're creating their own company towns - here's the 200-year history

Mega-corporations - from Facebook to Amazon - are creating modern-day company towns.

In Menlo Park, California, Facebook plans to build a new campus with 1,500 residences, a walkable retail district, a grocery store, and a hotel for its employees. Meanwhile, Amazon recently announced that it will build a second headquarters that could effectively turn the chosen city into a company town - much like what happened to Seattle when the online retail giant came to Seattle in the late 1990s. Dubbed HQ2, approximately 50,000 employees will work there.

Since the 19th century, companies have built company towns across the United States - municipalities where they own large percentages of the housing, stores, schools, churches, roads, and parks. In these towns, the corporation is also often the largest employer.

At their peak a century ago, there were more than 2,500 company towns housing 3% of the US population, according to The Economist.

As CityLab notes, many early company towns served as a way for corporations to manage labor relations, since they owned all the homes and could evict strike leaders. More modern company towns, like Hershey, Pennsylvania (named after famed chocolatier Milton Hershey's candy corporation), gave residents say in what the town prioritized.

Since then, the concept of the company town has evolved. Some have similar tactics to early company towns, while other companies build massive headquarters that dominate an existing community's infrastructure and space - and create a new ecosystem of businesses around the swelling employee population.

Take a look at the nearly 200-year evolution of company towns.