The Waterbury Democrat., 1931-02-10
By BRUCE CATION NEA Service Writer

NEA Service Writer
 (CopyrigEt, 1881. NEA Service, Incl
 Chicag o--When Philip D. Armour made . fortune overnight at the close of the Civil war by foreseeing the end of Il boom and selling at q high price pork that he was able to buy very chcspIy. his first thought was to find place where he could put this new money to work for him.
 Tn tho saga of tho Armour family, brought to a close recently by the retirement of the last of the Armours from the great packing house of Armour & Co.,. few developments were more important than this.
 Chicago, sprawIing and noisy. had not yet conclusively proved that 1t was to be far bigger than Milwau- kee, where Armour had his head quarters. But business was moving Chicago-ward, and three small pack ing houses had already bought q 200-acre tract of land on the far southwestern edge of the city and had established the Chicago Union stockyards.
 So Armour decided to establish a branch there. and in 1867 q barn. like structure was put up for the killing and dressing of hogs. It was < subsidiary of the Milwaukee firm of Plankinton & Armour, and 1t was called Armour & Co.
 And so, in a modest frame build ing, there began one of the those great enterprises that were to make Chicago. And the rise of the Armour family was well under way.
 By freak of chance, there hap pened in that same year of 1867 another event that was prove of the utmost importance to Armour and to all other meat packers. Some inventive genius devised a practical refrigerator car.
 Up to that time the business of packing neat varied only in minor details from the packing of meat in the days of ancient Rome. Each neighborhood had It's packing cen- ter. Great herds of cattle and swine were driven along dusty roads tc market town. there to be reduced to dressed meat. Most of the pro- duct was sold and eaten In the im- mediate vicinity. Only such meat as was salted, pickled or smoked could be sold at any distance.
 All of this was done precisely as it had been done for centuries. The railroads, to be sure. had introduced a new note; cattle and hogs could be shipped farther to market. and in greater quantities., than before. But the finished product was handled just as in the old days. No packer could hope for a nationwide mar ket.
 Nor could he use all of the flesh of the animals he killed. Only cleGr cuts of lean and fat could be mar keted. All else. except for the hide. was considered waste. The Chicago stockyar2s of that day used to cart wagonloads of discarded tissues and bones out into the empty pralrits and bury them.
 But Tn 1867, when Philip Armour was getting his subsidiary plant es- tab1ished .n Chicago, the refrigerator car came on the scene--and every thing was changed.
 The gecius who enabled the pack CTS to make Chicago the butcher shop for half of the world was Will liam Davis of Detroit.
 His crude refrigerator car imme- d.ateIy aroused the enthusiasm of stirred the deep opposition of the railroads. Tho railroads were prof fting hugely by the movement of livestock. They feared that the re- frigera.or car would do away with this trafac---never foresceing that the traffic in dressed meats would more than compensate for 1t.
 So. while packers rushed to the refrigerator car eagerly. the railroads held back. Packers would ship car loads of dressed beef from the middle west to the Atlantic coast, and queer accidents would happen. Cars would accidentally get shunted off onto s!dinGs and would lie there until their contents had spoiled slightly flor the refrigerator cars of those days were far from perfect.
 Then they would go on to their destination. and their purchasers would find that they had bought tainted beef. and would cry that this new stunt of shipping by re- frigeratOr car was Il fraud.
 But the packers stuck to 1t. When the railroads refused to build re- frigerator cars they built their own. Philip Armour himself went down to the packing plant the day the first Armour refrigerator car was loaded, and supcrintended the job. The car vent east, to New Eng land and when 1t came 10 the Hoosnc