ON CHRISTMAS DAY 1865 A GROUP of Chicago meat packers, livestock men, railroad executives, and others gathered on what had recently been marshland to celebrate the holiday and open the Union Stock Yard in the suburban Town of Lake in what was then just beyond the southwestern boundary of the city. They toasted the new enterprise organized by men who were friends and colleagues of the recently martyred president, Abraham Lincoln. The event took place in the newly opened Hough House, billed as the best hotel west of New York City. Chicagoans had long anticipated the opening of the livestock market. It attracted sightseers even before that December day. A guidebook to the market written by the journalist, Jack Wing preceded its opening.1 Construction began on June 1, 1865. The new stockyard was designed by Octave Chanute, who had designed previous railroad yards and later went on to play an important role in aviation history. The original plan called for forty acres of pens, an office building, a hotel to serve livestock shippers and visitors, as well as rail lines heading east and west. Plenty of land was reserved for an eventual expansion of the market.2And that expansion came quickly as the Union Stock Yard & Transit Company (USY&T Co.) soon operated the largest stockyard in the world just outside the city limits. That eventual expansion covered some 450 acres and spread from 39th Street to the north (now Pershing Road) to 47th Street and from Halsted Street to Racine Avenue. While Chicago took the title of “Porkopolis” from Cincinnati just prior to the Civil War, most of the city's slaughterhouses were located along the South Branch of the Chicago River in the Bridgeport neighborhood. By the 1870s, they began to move to the area just west of the stockyard that became known as Packingtown. By 1880, the Union Stock Yard had firmly established itself as the principal livestock market of the West. The Chicago meat packing industry was at the vanguard of industrialization. The combination of the vast livestock market and the quickly modernizing meat packers ushered in the future and the modern mass market on what had once been a desolate wetland.3Philip Danforth Armour operated a pork packinghouse in Milwaukee but soon recognized that the future of the industry lay in Chicago. In 1863, he helped his brothers establish a provision house in the city, and in 1867, they rented a small packinghouse in Bridgeport. The brothers formed Armour & Company in 1868 and purchased a larger plant. They moved their operations to Packingtown in the early 1870s, and Philip Armour moved to Chicago in 1875. That same year, Gustavus Swift joined Armour in Chicago as a cattle buyer and shipper and began slaughtering cattle in 1877. Nelson Morris, who like Swift entered the business as a livestock trader, began slaughtering animals in the mid-1870s. Other small packers joined these soon-to-be giants of the industry both in Packingtown and in the surrounding neighborhoods. Eventually more than two hundred packers vied for the animals in the stockyard pens.4The method of slaughter was designed to process animals as efficiently as possible and transformed the meat industry. It resembled an assembly line, only run backward. This disassembly line went through various transformations, all with the objective of increased productivity in the shortest amount of time. As an example, in 1884, five cattle splitters could process eight hundred cattle in ten hours. Ten years later, four splitters dealt with 1,200 cattle during a ten-hour shift. The Chicago meatpackers introduced modern industrial practices and vastly cut the time traditional butchers slaughtered and dressed a steer. In addition to increased production, the disassembly lines’ evolution decreased wages. Furthermore, the packers delivered more profits from the by-products industry, manufacturing everything from hides to soap and fertilizer and eventually pharmaceuticals.5This expansion did not come without its downside. The pollution from the industry hung over the surrounding area and the stench often impacted Chicagoans as far away as the North and West Sides of the city. Originally called the Bridgeport Stench, it soon took on the name the Stock Yard Stench. Also, labor conditions in the packinghouses and in the livestock market were not the best, and this soon led to the emergence of a union movement. The first strike in the stockyards took place in 1869. Labor strikes rocked the industry in 1877, 1886, 1894, 1901, and 1921–22. A permanently organized labor force would not emerge until the 1930s and 1940s.6The 1950s saw the decline of Chicago's meat packing industry. The square mile of livestock pens and packinghouses seemed to predict the deindustrialized future. Wilson and Company closed its Chicago plant in 1955. Swift and Armour both followed. By the mid-1960s, Packingtown looked more like a ghost town than the industrial giant it had once been. The USY&T Co. maintained the market and celebrated the hundredth anniversary of the Union Stock Yard in 1965, but the writing was on the wall, and the livestock market closed after the final market day on July 31, 1971.7Today that square mile is home to the most successful industrial park in Chicago. Roughly fifteen thousand men and women are employed in the Chicago Stockyards Industrial Park. Many are green industries which have replaced the old meat packers. Again, the stockyards are leading the way to the industrial future as they have for some 150 years.
Dominic A. Pacyga (Thu,) studied this question.