Union Stock Yards

thumb|300px|The Union Stock Yards in 1947

The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was formed by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a vast centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the South Side's New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world", the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades. The Yards, its workers, and its systems became inspiration for both literature and social reform, as well as study of industrial practice.

The stockyards became the focal point of the rise of some of the earliest international companies, whose ability to get product moved across the world became crucial. These companies and corporations refined industrial innovations and influenced financial markets. The Yards functioned as an integrated system linking transportation, livestock handling, processing, and distribution within a single site. Both the rise and fall of the Yards reflect the evolution of transportation services and technology in America. The stockyards have become integral in Chicago's cultural history. They are also considered one of the chief drivers that empowered the animal–industrial complex into its modern form.

From the Civil War through the 1920s, peaking in 1924, more meat was processed in Chicago than in any other place in the world. Construction began in June 1865 with an opening on Christmas Day. The Yards closed on July 30, 1971, after several decades of decline during the decentralization of the meatpacking industry. The neo-gothic Union Stock Yard Gate (1877) on Exchange Avenue was designated a Chicago Landmark in 1972 and a National Historic Landmark in 1981 and is the only remnant of the old stockyards, which largely became business and industrial parks after the closure.

History

thumb|200px|right|The Union Stock Yards in 1878

thumb|right|200px|1905 International Live Stock Exposition catalogue

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.

thumb|right|200px|Birdseye view, 1890

thumb|right|200px|The yards in 1897

thumb|200px|right|Panorama of the beef industry in 1900

thumb|right|200px|start=00:12|Sheep exiting a train into the stockyards as filmed by the [[Edison Company 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.

thumb|right|200px|Workers in the stockyards removing hides of animals

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

thumb|right|200px|Hog hoist, circa 1909

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

right|200px|thumb|Memorial to victims of the 1910 fire

thumb|200px|right|Aftermath of the 1934 fire

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

thumb|200px|right|The Union Stock Yards Livestock Pens, 1880

The prosperity of the stockyards was the result of both the concentration of railroads and the evolution of refrigerated railroad cars. Its decline was caused by further advances in post–World War II transportation and distribution. Direct sales of livestock from breeders to packers, facilitated by advancement in interstate trucking, made it cheaper to slaughter animals where they were raised and excluded the intermediary stockyards. In addition to a Chicago Landmark plaque nearby, Another plaque affixed to the inside of the gate tells the story of the "Fallen 21," the firefighters who died in the 1910 fire.

This limestone gate survives as one of the few relics of Chicago's heritage of livestock and meatpacking. The bovine head decoration over the central arch is thought to represent "Sherman", a prize-winning bull named after John B. Sherman, a founder of the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company. Paul Bourget and Sarah Bernhardt.

The play Saint Joan of the Stockyards, a version of the story of Joan of Arc by Bertolt Brecht, takes place in the stockyards.
In J. M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello, the protagonist says, "Chicago showed us the way; it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies."

Notes

Bibliography

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Street, Paul. "The 'Best Union Members': Class, Race, Culture, and Black Worker Militancy in Chicago's Stockyards during the 1930s." Journal of American Ethnic History 20#1, 2000, pp. 18–49. online
Street, Paul. "The Logic and Limits of 'Plant Loyalty': Black Workers, White Labor, and Corporate Racial Paternalism in Chicago's Stockyards, 1916-1940." Journal of Social History 29#3 1996, pp. 659–81. online
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Wade, Louise Carroll. Chicago's Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (University of Illinois Press, 1987) major scholarly study down to 1900.

External links

Chicago Historical Society's "History Files"
History of the Yards in A Biography of America
Chicago Stockyards Industrial Park Photographs at the Newberry Library