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
operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired swampland and
turned it to a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad money
behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards
operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become
known as "hog butcher for the world" and the center of the American meatpacking
industry for decades. The stockyards became the focal point of
the rise of some of the earliest international companies. These companies
refined novel industrial innovations and influenced financial markets. Both the
rise and fall of the district owe their fortunes to the evolution of
transportation services and technology in America. The stockyards have become
an integral part of the popular culture of Chicago's history.
From the Civil War until the 1920s and 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 in 1865. The Yards closed at midnight on
Friday, July 30, 1971, after several decades of decline during the
decentralization of the meatpacking industry. The Union Stock Yard Gate was
designated a Chicago Landmark on February 24, 1972, and a National
Historic Landmark on May 29, 1981. History
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 the City of 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. The stockyards that sprang up were usually
built along various rail lines of these new railroad companies . 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 1878, the New
York Central Railroad managed to buy a controlling interest in the Michigan
Central Railroad. 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 fighting the Civil War. 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
in Chicago rose from 117,000 head to 339,000 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. Keeping
up with the huge number of animals arriving each day proved impossible
until a new wave of consolidation and modernization altered the meatpacking
business in the post-Civil War era. The Union Stock Yards, designed to
consolidate operations, was built in 1864 on swampland south of the city. 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 acquired the 320-acre swampland area in
southwest Chicago for $100,000 in 1864. The stockyards were connected to the
city's main rail lines by 15 miles of track. In 1864, the Union Stock Yards
were located just outside of the southern boundary of the City of
Chicago. Within five years the area was incorporated into the city.
Eventually, the 375-acre site had 2300 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 within the confines of the Yards.
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. By 1900, the 475-acre
stockyard contained 50 miles of road, and had 130 miles of track along its
perimeter. At its largest size, The Yards covered nearly 1 square mile of
land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th to 47th Streets.
At one time, 500,000 US gallons a day of Chicago River water was pumped into the
stockyards. So much stockyard waste drained into the South Fork of the river
that it was called Bubbly Creek due to the gaseous products of decomposition.
The creek bubbles to this day. 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. The meatpacking district was served
between 1908 and 1957 by a short Chicago 'L' line with several stops, devoted
primarily to the daily transport of thousands of workers and even tourists
to the site. The line was constructed when the City of Chicago forced the
removal of surface trackage on 40th Street.
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 National Wrecking cleared a 102-acre site and
removed some 50 acres of animal pens, 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 size 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. Philip 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.
This new plant employed the modern "assembly line" method of work. The
mechanized process with its killing wheel and conveyors helped inspire the
automobile assembly line that Henry Ford popularlized in 1913. For a time the
Armour plant, located on a twelve acre site, was renowned as the largest
factory in the world. In addition, hedging transactions by the
stockyard companies was 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 extremely 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
Chicago in 1875 and built another modern large-scale meatpacking plant at 42nd
Street and South Justine Street. The Morris Company built a meatpacking plant
at 42nd Street and Elizabeth Street. The Hammond Company and the Wilson Company
also built a meatpacking plants in the area west of the Chicago stockyards.
Eventually, meatpacking byproduct manufacturing of leather, soap,
fertilizer, glue, pharmaceuticals, imitation ivory, gelatin, shoe polish,
buttons, perfume, and violin strings prospered in the neighborhood.
Additionally, there was a "Hair Factory," located at 44th Street and
Ashland Avenue, which processed hair from butchered animals into saleable
items. Next to the Union Stock Yards, the
International Amphitheatre building was built on west side of Halsted Street at
42nd Street in the 1930s, originally to hold the annual International Live Stock
Exposition which began in 1900. However, the International Amphitheatre became a
venue for many events and its use continued for years after the stockyards
closed in 1971. = Fires =
The Chicago Union Stock Yards Fire started on December 22, 1910, destroying
$400,000 of property and killing twenty-one 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 by Chief
Seyferlich 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 Saturday, May 19, 1934, which burned almost 90% of the
stockyards, including the exchange building, stockyard inn, and the
International Livestock Exposition building. This larger fire was seen as
far away as Indiana, and caused approximately $6 million worth of
damages. While only one watchman was killed, a few cattle also perished, but
the yards were in business the following Sunday evening.
= Workers and Unions = Following the opening of the new 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.
At first, the residents were overwhelmingly Irish and German—60%
Irish and 30% German. Officially designated the "Town of Lake" until its
incorporation into the City of Chicago in about 1870, the neighborhood was
known locally as "Packingtown." However, much later in the 1930s, the community
would become known as the "Back of the Yards."
The overwhelming sensation about the neighborhood was the smell of the
community caused not just by the packing plants located immediately to the east,
but also by the 345-acre Chicago Union Stock Yards containing 2,300 pens of
livestock, located further east from the packing plants.
= 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." Indeed, the area would continue to be called Town of Lake until
1939. Witness that the newspaper of the area was called the Town of Lake
Journal. Only with the founding of the community organization called the "Back
of the Yards Neighborhood Council" in 1939 did the neighborhood west and south
of the meat packinghouses start being called the "Back of the Yards." It was a
name that the residents proudly claimed as their own. In 1939, the Town of Lake
Journal officially changed its name to Back of the Yards Journal.
Pioneers to the area first called "Town of Lake were S. S. Crocker and John
Caffrey. Indeed, Crocker earned the nickname "Father of the Town of Lake."
By February 1865 the area was incorporated officially as "Town of
Lake" the area still consisted of fewer than 700 persons. In the early 1860s the
meat packing industry of the United States was still located in Cincinnati,
Ohio, the original "Porkopolis" of the pre-Civil War era. However, with the end
of the American 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 of Chicago. Operations for this early
stockyard, however, still meant holding and feeding cattle and hogs in transit
to meat packing plants further east—Indianapolis and, of course,
Cincinnati. Workers began settling in housing
located to the west of the Union Stockyards as early as ht
Decline and current use The prosperity of the stockyards was due
to both the concentration of railroads and the evolution of refrigerated
railroad cars. Its decline was due to 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. At first, the major meatpacking companies resisted change,
but Swift and Armour both surrendered and vacated their plants in the Yards in
the 1950s. In 1971, the area bounded by Pershing
Road, Ashland, Halsted, and 47th Street became The Stockyards Industrial Park.
The neighborhood to the west and south of the industrial park is still known as
Back of the Yards, and is still home to a thriving immigrant population.
= Gate = A remnant of the Union Stock Yard Gate
still arches over Exchange Avenue, next to the firefighters' memorial, and can
be seen by those driving along Halsted Street. This limestone gate, marking the
entrance to the stockyards, survives as one of the few relics of Chicago's
heritage of livestock and meatpacking. The steer head 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. The gate is a
designated U.S. National Historic Landmark.
In popular culture In 1906 Upton Sinclair published The
Jungle, uncovering the horrid conditions in the stockyards around the start of
the 20th century. The stockyards are referred to in Carl Sandburg's poem
Chicago: "proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with
Railroads and Freight Handler to the Nation." Frank Sinatra mentioned the
yards in his 1964 song "My Kind of Town," and the stockyards receive a
mention in the opening chapter of Thomas Pynchon's novel Against the Day. The
Skip James song "Hard Times Killing floor blues" refers to the nickname of
the slaughter part of the stockyards during the great depression in the
1930s. The Yards were a major tourist stop, with visitors such as Rudyard
Kipling, 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. See also
Chicago Board of Trade Chicago Mercantile Exchange
Notes Bibliography
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