page_title: Union Stock Yards
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Union Stock Yards / History
context_page_description: 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 marshland and turned it into 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 the "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.
context_section_description: 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 (5) 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 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. 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 marshland 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 (hence the "Union" name) acquired the 320-acre (1.3 km²) marshland area in southwest Chicago for US$100,000 in 1864. The stockyards were connected to the city's main rail lines by 15 miles (24 km) 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.
  Eventually, the 375-acre (1.52 km²) 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 c
caption: The Union Stock Yards in Chicago in 1878
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