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 Hog Butchering in DeKalb in 1915

From the Dec. 29, 2015, MidWeek (DeKalb County, Illinois) "Looking Back."

From 1915, 100 years ago.

"A unique breach of the law reported today by Police Officer Sid Rowe.  He was called to the foreign settlement on tenth Street by a report of a disturbance and found one of the families there just finishing the work of butchering a pig with all the accompanying squealing and uproar.

"He informed the foreigner, who could not talk English, that he was violating the law and warned him against a repetition of the offense but no arrests were made as the man was innocent enough."

Don't Kill That Pig, Now.  --DaCoot