Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Union Stock Yards, Chicago, 1947. 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 capital behind the ...
Union stockyards in the United States were centralized urban livestock yards where multiple rail lines delivered animals from ranches and farms for slaughter and meat packing. A stockyard company managed the work of unloading the livestock, which was faster and more efficient than using railway staff. [ 1 ]
Initially, the Union Stockyards operated as a feeding station for stock on their way to eastern markets like the Union Stock Yards in Chicago. [6] The first livestock exchange was located in a farmhouse on the site. The Union Stock Yards originally covered over 260 acres (1.1 km 2) of land, with pens covering nearly 200 acres (0.8 km 2). [7]
The Union Stock Yards Company of Omaha was a 90-year-old company first founded in South Omaha, Nebraska in 1878 by John A. Smiley. After being moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa and dissolved within a year, the company was reorganized and moved to South Omaha in 1883. [ 1 ]
The Union Stock Yard Gate is located on Chicago's South Side, on a plaza in the center of Exchange Avenue at its junction with Peoria Street. This position marked the principal eastern entrance to the stock yards, which occupied several hundred acres to the west. It is a limestone construction with a central main arch flanked by two smaller arches.
The Chicago Union Stock Yards fire of 1934 was the second-most destructive fire in the city's history, after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, in terms of property damage and buildings lost. [1] The Union Stock Yards of Chicago, Illinois in the United States were, at the time, the commercial butchering and meatpacking center of the Midwest.
Completed for the Union Stock Yards Company of Omaha in May 1926, the Livestock Exchange Building was the most significant structure associated with the Omaha Stockyards and served as the center of the livestock industry in Omaha. Chicago and Omaha were the two largest centers for livestock processing in the nation, and the industry was the ...
By 1880, the company had become Chicago's most important business and had helped make Chicago and its Union Stock Yards the center of America's meatpacking industry. During the same period, its facility in Omaha, Nebraska, boomed, making the city's meatpacking industry the largest in the nation by 1959.