Then & Now: Union Stockyards – Chicago

The Union Stockyard and Transit Company, known commonly as The Chicago Stockyards, was a major industrial hub in Chicago for more than a century.

Officially opening on Christmas Day 1865, the stockyards were formed as a consolidation of older stockyards scattered throughout the city.

In doing so, the city’s meatpackers decided to concentrate their efforts along the south branch of the Chicago River, partly because of the complaints from the odors, but mostly to take advantage of improved transportation facilities offered by the newly opened Illinois and Michigan Canal.

While the stockyards were located near a fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River to take advantage of the canal, the stockyards also were developed in tandem with the railroads, which would take freshly slaughtered meat all over the country.

At their height, it is estimated that the stockyards processed nearly 15 million head of livestock a year. All of this helped position Chicago as the center of the American meat industry.

By the close of the 19th century, the stockyards became a popular tourist attraction by allowing visitors to view the killing floors and “disassembly lines.” The entire slaughtering process was known as a “disassembly line,” and the Chicago stockyards are widely credited with providing the inspiration for modern industrial assembly lines.

For more than 100 years, millions of cattle, hogs and sheep were being transported from hundreds of miles away to Chicago to be slaughtered, processed, packed and sent via railroad to cities across the U.S. Gustavus Swift, who came to Chicago to ship cattle, helped to develop a way to send fresh-chilled beef in ice-cooled railroad cars.

The Union Stockyards left an indelible mark on Chicago’s history, not only defining the city as “hog-butcher for the world,” but also provided jobs for the many immigrants coming to Chicago during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

In addition to providing employment for newly arriving Europeans, the stockyards also were the inspiration for Upton Sinclair’s Nobel Prize-winning book The Jungle, which revealed unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry and ultimately would lead to many reform measures.

Once refrigerated trucks and highways came into play, the processing plants, no longer dependent upon the proximity of the railroads, decentralized and moved west. The Union Stockyard and Transit Company closed its doors in 1971.

The Then and Now images show views of the old Lemont limestone gate, which marked the entrance to the stockyards. Designed by the architectural firm of Burnham & Root, the gate was built in 1875 and is located near Exchange Avenue and Peoria Street.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972, the gate survives as one of the few visual reminders of Chicago’s past prominence in the livestock and meatpacking industries.