Tied to the Great Packing Machine: The Midwest and Meatpacking

CHAPTER 2 It Was All So Very Businesslike

FOUR MAJOR PHASES of development have characterized meatpacking’s industrial evolution in the Midwest since the early 1800s.The initial phase emerged during the settlement of the trans-Appalachian West when merchant-wholesalers, centered in Cincinnati and the Ohio River towns during the 1830s and 1840s, slaughtered and packed pork seasonally as part of their diversified commercial strategies.During this period, pork was packed with brine into barrels for shipment; bacon was dry salted, hams were cured,and mess pork was preserved in a special pickle.By 1860,the growing railroad network in the North and Midwest shifted meatpacking to cities with better rail connections, especially Chicago, where the Union Stockyards opened in 1865,initiating the second major phase of meatpacking,the terminal-market pattern. From the end of the Civil War through the first third of the twentieth century, the industry was squarely centered in large midwestern cities around the major public terminal markets—or stockyards,as they were more commonly known.However,in the late nineteenth century,as more cattle and hogs were raised in and around Iowa especially , packing companies began to establish plants in more rural parts of the region where they could purchase animals directly from farmers or through buyers. This direct-buying pattern,which characterizes the third phase of meatpacking’s development ,became nearly as important as the terminal-marketing part of the industry from the 1920s to 1950s. Finally, in the fourth phase, beginning in 1960, Iowa Beef Packers combined direct buying and revolutionary technical and marketing innovations, a move that overturned the industry during the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Merchant Wholesaling, 1820–1865 Before the 1820s, farmers in the newly opened trans-Appalachian regions often slaughtered their own hogs and packed the pork for sale, but this product varied CHAPTER 2 It Was All So Very Businesslike Industrial Evolution widely in quality and usually was not very good. Farmers also often drove their animals to nearby cities for processing, and Cincinnati became an important site for commercial pork packing shortly after 1800. Steam-powered riverboat transportation secured Cincinnati’s early dominance of this trade by the 1820s; its porkindustry output doubled between the 1818–1819 and 1822–1823 winter seasons. From the 1820s through the Civil War era, Cincinnati remained the center of pork production in the Midwest. By 1825, the city packed more pork than any city in the United States. Although entrepreneurs had established facilities specifically for pork packing during the later antebellum period, merchants with interests in wholesale groceries and commission mercantile activity carried out most pork packing in Cincinnati and particularly in the smaller Ohio River valley cities, such as Louisville, Madison, and Chillicothe (see map 1). During the winter months from November to March,merchants with available processing and storage space engaged in pork packing as part of their general mercantile activities. Much of Cincinnati’s meat—as well as lard, flour, whisky, cheese, and butter—was shipped south to New Orleans, where many of these products were exported to Havana, England, and France. By the 1840s, half of New Orleans’s receipts came from Cincinnati. In 1844, the value of Cincinnati’s pork products shipped to New Orleans totaled nearly $3 million.1 In the 1820s,Cincinnati’s slaughtering and packing usually took place in separate buildings—slaughtering in facilities outside the city, and processing in the merchants ’ warehouses. The limited scale of these packing operations is clear when one considers that the forty-eight Cincinnati packers in 1840 employed an average of twenty-five workers.Still,in 1850,Cincinnati packing plants produced 30 percent of the Midwest’s pork supply. In the 1840s, some Cincinnati entrepreneurs developed more focused and centralized meatpacking operations. Ebenezer Wilson built a beef-packing plant on Deer Creek, for instance, that included holding pens, slaughterhouse, and processing facilities in the same complex. In the early 1850s, Milward and Oldershaw and Hieatt and Company followed suit. Milward and Oldershaw ’s Covington,Kentucky,pork-packing plant was purportedly the largest facility in the nation when it was completed in 1851. It packed more than twenty-three thousand hogs during the 1851–1852 season. But, as Margaret Walsh has explained, the scale of these somewhat more substantial operations would pale in comparison to those of the larger Chicago packing operations just two decades later. In 1878–1879,both the Anglo-American Packing and Provision Company and Armour packed just under one million hogs in their Chicago plants.2 8 economics...