In the early 1860s the meat packing industry of the United States was located in
Cincinnati, Ohio, the original "Porkopolis" of the pre-
Civil War era. However, with the end of the Civil War, the meat packing industry had started to move westward along with the westward migration of the population of the United States. For the meat packing industry moving west meant coming to
Chicago. As early as 1827, Archibauld Clybourn had established himself as a butcher in a log slaughter house on the north branch of the
Chicago River and supplied most to the garrison of
Fort Dearborn. Other small butchers came later. In 1848, the
Bull's Head Stockyard began operations at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue on the
West Side. Operations for this early stockyard, however, still meant holding and feeding
cattle and
hogs in transit to meat packing plants further east especially
Indianapolis and Cincinnati. Before construction of the various private stockyards,
tavern owners provided
pastures and care for cattle herds waiting to be sold. With the
spreading service of railroads, several small stockyards were created in and around Chicago. In 1848, a stockyard called the
Bulls Head Market was opened to the public. The Bulls Head Stock Yards were located at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue. In the years that followed, several small stockyards were scattered throughout the city. Between 1852 and 1865, five railroads were constructed to Chicago. Some railroads built their own stockyards in Chicago. The
Illinois Central and the
Michigan Central railroads combined to build the largest set of pens on the lake shore east of Cottage Grove Avenue from 29th Street to 35th Street. In this way,
Cornelius Vanderbilt, owner of the New York Central Railroad, got his start in the stockyard business in Chicago. Several factors contributed to consolidation of the Chicago stockyards: westward expansion of railroads between 1850 and 1870, which drove great commercial growth in Chicago as a major railroad center, and the
Mississippi River blockade during the
Civil War that closed all north–south river trade. The United States government purchased a great deal of beef and pork to feed the
Union troops. As a consequence, hog receipts at the Chicago stockyards rose from 392,000 hogs in 1860 to 1,410,000 hogs over the winter
butchering season of 1864–1865; over the same time period,
beef receipts rose from 117,000 head to 338,000 head. With an influx of butchers and small meat packing concerns, the number of businesses greatly increased to process the flood of
livestock being shipped to the Chicago stockyards. The goal was to butcher and
process the livestock locally rather than transferring it to other northern cities for butchering and processing. It was south and west of the earlier stock yards in an area bounded by
Halsted Street on the east, South Racine Avenue on the west, with 39th Street as the northern boundary and 47th Street as the southern boundary. Led by the
Alton, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad and the
Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway, a
consortium of nine railroad companies (hence the "
Union" name) acquired the marshland area in southwest Chicago for US$100,000 in 1864. The stockyards were connected to the city's main rail lines by of track. in 1897 Eventually, the site had 2,300 separate livestock pens, room to accommodate 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle and 22,000
sheep at any one time. Additionally, hotels, saloons, restaurants, and offices for merchants and brokers sprang up in the growing community around the stockyards. Led by
Timothy Blackstone, a founder and the first president of the Union Stock Yards and Transit Company, "The Yards" experienced tremendous growth. Processing two million animals yearly by 1870, in two decades the number rose to nine million by 1890. Between 1865 and 1900, approximately 400 million livestock were butchered there. By the start of the 20th century, the stockyards employed 25,000 people and produced 82 percent of the domestic meat consumed nationally. In 1921, the stockyards employed 40,000 people. Two thousand men worked directly for the Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., and the rest worked for companies such as meatpackers, which had plants in the stockyards. When the city permanently reversed the flow of the Chicago River in 1900, the intent was to prevent the Stock Yards' waste products, along with other sewage, from flowing into
Lake Michigan and contaminating the city's drinking water. Evolving methods of transportation and distribution led to declining business and the closing of the Union Stock Yards in 1971. National Wrecking Company negotiated a contract whereby a 102-acre site and some 50 acres of animal pens were cleared, along with auxiliary buildings and the eight-story Exchange Building. It took approximately eight months to complete the job and ready the site for the building of an industrial park.
Effect on industry The area and scale of the stockyards, along with technological advancements in
rail transport and
refrigeration, allowed for the creation of some of America's first truly global companies led by entrepreneurs such as
Gustavus Franklin Swift and
Philip Danforth Armour. Armour was the first person to build a modern large-scale meatpacking plant in Chicago in 1867. The
Armour plant was built at 45th Street and Elizabeth Avenue immediately to the west of the Union Stockyards. The plant employed the modern "assembly line" (or rather disassembly line) method of work. The mechanized process with its
killing wheel and conveyors helped inspire the automobile
assembly line that
Henry Ford popularized in 1913. For a time the Armour plant, located on a 12-acre site, was renowned as the largest factory in the world. In addition,
hedging transactions by the stockyard companies were pivotal in the establishment and growth of the Chicago-based
commodity exchanges and
futures markets. Selling on the futures market allowed the seller to have a guaranteed price at a set time in the future. This was helpful to those sellers who expected their cattle or hogs to come to market with a glut of other cattle or hogs when prices might necessarily be substantially lower than the guaranteed futures price. Following the arrival of Armour in 1867,
Gustav Swift's company arrived in 1875 and built another modern large-scale meatpacking plant at 42nd Street and South Justine Street.
Morris & Company built a meatpacking plant at 42nd Street and Elizabeth Street. The
Hammond Company and the
Wilson Company also built meatpacking plants in the area west of the Chicago stockyards. Eventually, meatpacking byproduct manufacturing of leather, soap, fertilizer, glue (such as the large glue factory located at 44th Street and Loomis Street), pharmaceuticals, imitation ivory, gelatin, shoe polish, buttons, perfume, and violin strings prospered in the neighborhood. Next to the Union Stock Yards, the
International Amphitheatre building was built on the west side of Halsted Street at 42nd Street in the 1930s, originally to hold the annual International Live Stock Exposition which began in 1900. It became a venue for many national conventions. Historian
William Cronon concludes: :Because of the Chicago packers, ranchers in Wyoming and
feedlot farmers in Iowa regularly found a reliable market for their animals, and on average received better prices for the animals they sold there. At the same time and for the same reason, Americans of all classes found a greater variety of more and better meats on their tables, purchased on average at lower prices than ever before. Seen in this light, the packers' "rigid system of economy" seemed a very good thing indeed.
Fires The first Chicago Union Stock Yards fire started on December 22, 1910, destroying $400,000 of property and killing 21 firemen, including the Fire Marshal James J. Horan. Fifty engine companies and seven hook and ladder companies fought the fire until it was declared extinguished on December 23. In 2004, a memorial to all Chicago firefighters who have died in the line of duty was erected just behind the Union Stock Yards Gate at the intersection of Exchange Avenue and Peoria Street. A larger fire occurred on May 19, 1934, which burned almost 90 percent of the stockyards, including the Exchange Building, the Stock Yard Inn, and the International Livestock Exposition building. The fire was seen as far away as Indiana and caused approximately $6 million in damages. One employee and 8,000 head of cattle died.
Workers and unions Following the opening of the Union Stockyards on December 25, 1865, a community of workers began living in the area just west of the packing plants between Ashland Avenue and South Robey Street and bounded on the north by 43rd Street and on the south by 47th Street. By 1900 newly arrived Poles, Slovaks, and Lithuanians were replacing English, German, and Bohemian workers. Instead of complex machinery that required skilled workers, simplification made it possible to use strong unskilled men. at a lower pay scale. The jobs paid far more than anything in Eastern Europe, and new employees brought over their relatives. Historian
Dominic A. Pacyga explores several key themes in urban economic history. He argues that the Chicago Stockyards played a crucial role in creating a modern industrial culture characterized by large corporations, a factory system merging human and machine labor, and an extensive transportation system based on the railroads linking Chicago to the rural Midwest. He shows how the Union Stock Yard shaped the surrounding ethnic neighborhoods and supported the upward mobility of tens of thousands of immigrant families, especially the Polish employees. He rejects the
muckraking theme of
Upton Sinclair's 1905 novel
The Jungle that vividly describes filthy and unsanitary practices that Pacyga says did not happen. He does not accept Sinclair's implication that the stockyards dehumanized the workers. Pacyga applauds the mechanized innovations introduced by the stockyards, which increased worker productivity and wages, while increasing the availability of inexpensive meat to most American families. The stockyards' reflected the Chicago business leaders' disapproval of organized labor. To avoid strikes the companies set up welfare programs and pensions. In all Pacyga depicts the rise of the stockyards as an American spectacle of the modern age, one that attracted millions of students and tourists to witness the dramatic scene of meat processing. Pacyga closes by tracing the stockyards' steady decline and disappearance in the 1950s as more profit could be made by moving the slaughtering closer to the western farms and ranches, using trucks instead of rail for transportation.
Back of the Yards Community Settlement in the area that was to become known as the "Back of the Yards" began in the 1850s before there were any meat packers or stockyards in the area. At this time the area was known as the "Town of Lake," Pioneers to the neighborhood were S. S. Crocker and John Caffrey. Indeed, Crocker earned the nickname "Father of the Town of Lake". ==Decline and current use==