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A refrigerated railroad car at a Salt Lake City depot, April 1916. The type of ventilator and refrigeration cars shown here were particularly effective in shipping produce but were also commonly used to ship meat. They used a combination of ice blocks and vents at the top of the car. The ice would cool the air, which would then sink, and warm air would rise and flow out of the vents.
88 The Ogden Union Stockyard started out as just a few stock pens near the Weber River and the Ogden rail yard in the 1910s and rapidly grew into a sprawling complex of corrals, specialized barns, auction arenas, and the headquarters of the Ogden Livestock Exchange. By the late 1920s, it had become the largest stockyard operation west of Denver, and several hundred thousand animals made their way through the facility each year. The stockyard site became a demonstration of industrialization and Progressive Era agriculture with the layout of the yard as a reflection of advancing concepts of workflow, the integration of the rail system for the mass transport of livestock, the close coordination with the meat packing industry, and the extensive incorporation of new technologies to facilitate sanitation. In the fall of 2014, the former Ogden Union Stockyard site was a collection of demolished (and partially demolished) buildings, crumbling pavement, decaying fences, and mounds of military surplus items from its use as a storage location. It scarcely resembled the
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The Last Word in Stockyard Construction: The Rise and Fall of the Ogden
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A Park City, Utah, butcher shop, 1905. The men in white apron and overalls are Willard Bircumshaw (left), Jim Rasband, and Joe Brandel. Such butcher shops had a limited capacity to butcher large numbers of animals, yet they were also the primary source of fresh meat for urban Utahns in the 1800s. —
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The development of the stockyard complex in Ogden drew heavily on the lessons learned elsewhere in the nation.
once-bustling livestock operation it had hosted for decades. Only the historic Exchange Building remained intact, though it, too, had seen far better days. Yet, amidst the rubble you could almost hear faint echoes of lowing cattle, bleating sheep, and hard-working livestock handlers. Standing among the archaeological remains of the expansive yard, the telltale remains of the site’s epic past were still discernible: the different pens assigned to different species of livestock, the stamped concrete pathways along which the animals had once been herded, the double-decker loading chutes used to efficiently load and off-load thousands of head of livestock to and from waiting trains. Plans to redevelop the stockyard site as a business park prompted an array of historical and archaeological studies to document the physical remains before they were gone and gather information about its history absent in the
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