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.J'Nell L. Pate, Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards (Texas Christian University Press: Fort Worth, Texas, 2005) p. 79. 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 one of the only remnants of the old stockyards (along with several freight rail lines and right-of-ways and the former Live Stock National Bank building) which largely became business and industrial parks after the closure.
History
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.J'Nell L. Pate, Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards, p. 63. 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 slaughterhouse 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.J'Nell L. Pate, Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards, p. 96.
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 Bull's Head Market was opened to the public.J'Nell L. Pate, Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards, p. 75. The Bulls Head Stock Yards were located at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue.Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986) p. 16 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,Aaron E. Klein, The History of the New York Central System (Smithmark Publishers, Inc.: New York, 1995) pp. 40-41. 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,Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (University of Illinois Press: Urbana, Illinois, 1997) p. 10. 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.J'Nell L. Pate, Livestock Hotels: America's Historic Stockyards, p. 76 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.Rick Halpern (1997), Down on the Killing Floor, pp. 10-11. The goal was to butcher and process the livestock locally rather than transferring it to other northern cities for butchering and processing.
The Union Stock Yards, designed to consolidate operations, was built in 1864 on marshland south of the city.Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy, p. 16. 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 1864, the Union Stock Yards were located just outside the southern boundary of the city of Chicago. Within five years, the area was incorporated into the city.Halpern (1997), Down on the Killing Floor, p. 11
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. By 1900, the stockyard contained of road and had of track along its perimeter. At its largest area, The Yards covered nearly of land, from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and from 39th Street (now Pershing Road) to 47th Street.
At one time, per day of Chicago River water were pumped into the stockyards. So much stockyard waste drained into the South Branch 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 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 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.Arnstein & Lehr, The First 120 Years (2013).
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.Robert A Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of Local Democracy (University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1986) p. 17. 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.Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–1954, p. 8. For a time the Armour plant, located on a 12-acre site,Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904–1954, p. 12. 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.