Friday, December 16, 2022

A Chicago Christmas: Merry Union Stockyards 'Hog Butcher for the World'

From the December 4, 2022, Chicago Tribune "Holiday Trivia:  Fun facts to make the season even brighter."

CATTLE CALL

Chicago's Union Stockyards opened on Christmas Day, 1865, ushering in by15 locomotive-pulled cattle cars.  

Situated on a once-swampy site that stretched from Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue and Pershing Road to 47th Street.

It took 1,000-plus men and 30 miles of ditches and drains to build the site that would bolster Chicago's already booming meatpacking industry and establish the city as "Hog Butcher for the World."

The 375-acre site would eventually accomodate over 75,000 hogs, 21,000 cattle and over 22,000 sheep in its 2,300 separate livestock pens.

--Cooter


No comments: