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The Last Word in Stockyard Construction: The Rise and Fall of the Ogden Union Stockyard
The Last Word in Stockyard Construction: The Rise and Fall of the Ogden Union Stockyard
BY SHERI MURRAY ELLIS
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.
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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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.
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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 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 written record. While some of the history of the stockyard and its glory days has been documented and while personal memories of the livestock auctions and social occasions that occurred there remain, little has been written about why the stockyard came to be and why it looked the way it did. 1
Ogden Packing and Provision Company, circa 1915. Most of the buildings in this photograph are still standing.
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An aerial image of Ogden Union Stockyards from 1932 Ogden Livestock Digest. Note the double-decker loading chutes (near center-left) and the newly completed exchange building (center-bottom). The original caption notes the “close relationship between transportation and yarding facilities” and the “modern office facilities for those doing business on this market.”
Courtesy of Ogden City
The Ogden-area livestock industry progressed hand-in-hand with the meat packing industry. Prior to the industrialization of meat packing, the butchering of animals typically took place at home, on a local farm, or at a butcher shop. Prior to the early 1900s and due to a lack of effective methods to keep processed meat cool during long-distance transport, most fresh meat available in the urban areas of the West came from local animals or those transported live from other areas of the country and butchered nearby. Canned meat was also available, but it was far less preferable to fresh meat and largely relegated to use by remote or itinerant workers, such as sheep and cattle herders.
Shipping live animals by rail was a costly endeavor and one fraught with financial inefficiency. For instance, prior to the 1890s, the average death rate among livestock during rail transport was 6 percent for cattle and 9 percent for sheep. 2 Couple this mortality rate with the fact that roughly 60 percent of the body mass of sheep or cattle was considered inedible or unusable by American standards and the actual financial return on the consumable portion of any given animal was relatively low. This financial inefficiency spurred the development of refrigerated train cars that could ship only the edible or saleable product—the meat—rather than the entire animal. Although the first refrigerated railroad cars appeared in the 1850s, their reliance on blocks of ice limited their usefulness and effective traveling distance. Not until the
late 1870s and early 1880s, more than a decade after the transcontinental railroad connected Ogden to the rest of the nation, did Swift and Company develop the first truly functional refrigerated cars that could transport processed meat products to urban consumers. 3 As William Cronon writes, “the refrigerated railroad car . . . was a simple piece of technology with extraordinarily far-reaching implications.” These cars, along with the expansion of the rail system through smaller interurban railways, formed the basis by which the livestock and meat packing industries would change from small-scale, seasonal ranches to large-scale, regional centers supplying consumers year-round across large distances. 4 The Ogden Union Stockyards became one of the primary centers of this type serving the Intermountain West.
The development of the stockyard complex in Ogden drew heavily on the lessons learned elsewhere in the nation. In the decades after the Civil War, Chicago rose as the livestock distribution center of the country. This was due in large part to the many railroad connections in the city, as well as to the role the city played in distributing supplies to soldiers via rail during the war. From Chicago, livestock would be shipped directly to eastern states or herded via stock drives to secondary distribution points, such as Kansas City, where special stock cars transported the live animals westward via rail. During the stock drives, some of which crossed more than 1,200 miles, livestock commonly lost a substantial percentage of their body weight resulting in lower sale prices for live animals.
Along with the problems associated with animal death, injury, dehydration, and malnutrition that arose in the course of this long-distance transport came a social and economic backlash pushing railroad companies to provide better conditions for animals. This prompted railroad companies to invest not only in newer railroad stock cars that provided feeding and watering facilities but also in small yards along their routes where livestock could be temporarily off-loaded. More traditional feedlots were established at large rail hubs where livestock could be “finished” or fattened up with high-calorie feed before sending them to market. Soon the rail companies recognized that packaging the various aspects of the meat industry in the same location would bring tremendous economic return, and they began creating subsidiary companies that dealt in all manner of livestock transport, slaughtering, butchering, packaging, and meat distribution. One of the earliest large-scale examples of this was the Union Stock Yards of Chicago.
In 1865, a consortium of nine railroad companies, all of which had started small-scale meat packing operations around Chicago, consolidated their efforts in the Union Stock Yards. The massive yard, which included transport pens, a feedlot, slaughterhouses, and meat packing plants, eventually covered 475 acres. 5 The concept behind the facility was that live animals would be transported by various means to the yard from local or regional sources that were not too distant—thereby minimizing weight loss and fatalities—and finished meat products would be shipped out of the yard to all parts of the country. By processing animals at the yard and shipping only the edible products across greater distances, profit margins could be greatly increased. The Chicago Union Stock Yards became a model of both what worked and what did not for subsequent stockyards built across the country, including the Ogden Union Stockyard.
The Union Stock Yards of the Chicago were, for all intents and purposes, the birthplace of the industrial slaughterhouse. The first largescale slaughterhouse and meat packing plant was constructed adjacent to the Chicago yards in 1867 by the Armour brothers (of Armour Hot Dog fame) and was a dramatic change from the smaller warehouse-style plants that had existed up to that point. 6 The modern slaughterhouse, with its moving assembly (or disassembly) line, was not only a pragmatic solution to using new technology to increase cost efficiency and production but also a way of removing the act of butchering from the view of the general public—something that had become a concern in
Europe and the United States as an affront to civilized sensibilities. By the 1880s, the mechanized slaughtering associated with the Chicago stockyards had spread throughout much of the country and changed the meat packing industry to one of mass-production. 7
The concept of the large-scale mechanized slaughterhouse reached Ogden just after the turn-of-the-century. In 1906, the Ogden Packing and Provision Company was established, opening its doors as a state-of-the-art facility with the newest in technology and the facilities to accommodate the increased focus on food safety that derived from the recently passed Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. 8
It was also amidst all of these technological advancements that the Ogden Union Stockyards came to be. Not surprisingly the impetus for the establishment of the yards came from members of the meat packing industry. Specifically, a group of Ogden area businessmen—the majority of whom where officers of the Ogden Packing and Provision Company—incorporated the stockyards on July 29, 1916. The new establishment was called the Ogden Union Stockyard Company and had among its initial incorporators W. H. Wattis, Fred J. Kiesel, S. S. Jensen, James Pingree, Lars Hansen, and Lester P. Whitlock. 9 The stockyard company started with a capital investment of $250,000. 10
The founders of the stockyard had spent the preceding decade building up their meat packing operation east of the Weber River and north of Twenty-fourth Street. The initial plant of the Ogden Packing Company (later the Ogden Packing and Provision Company) was completed in 1906, but expansion of the facilities started almost immediately. 11 The plant included a small stockyard, located to the south, where local ranchers sold and traded livestock and from which the company purchased animals for slaughter. 12 By 1917, when the Ogden Union Stockyard officially opened, the Ogden Packing and Provision Company was reportedly “the largest meat packing plant west of the Missouri River.” 13 Its capacity at that time was enormous, more than local ranchers could supply through the small stockyards located there. This resulted in the company not only leading the way to establish the Ogden Union Stockyards across the river but also in launching a concerted campaign to encourage ranchers to increase their herd sizes (particularly for hogs)—even going so far as to purchase and distribute brood sows throughout the West and advancing payments to ranchers to allow them to expand their herds. 14
Contracts for the construction of the first part of the new stockyards were let in late October 1916 to James Stewart and Company, a St. Louis–based firm that was in the midst of construction on a massive expansion of the adjacent Ogden Packing and Provision Company plant. 15 The initial contract was for $50,000. Within a few days, the grounds of the seventy-acre stockyard were graded, and concrete floors for buildings and pens were being poured. Within the yard, stamped concrete in different patterns marked paths or walkways where livestock were herded to and from the loading chutes along the north side of the yard and through the middle of the yard and to the scale house, pens, and specialized livestock barns. The paving, combined with an elaborate system of sewer drains and piped water, was implemented with the express purpose of facilitating the cleaning of the yard to improve animal welfare and general yard conditions. These were seen as the most modern of touches, touches that were touted by the Ogden Standard Examiner as “more modern than those of Chicago.” 16 Nearby, the new packing plant buildings, also made of reinforced concrete, were seen as the “latest word in packing house construction” and were heralded for including separate dining and rest rooms for female employees. 17
The first phase of the stockyards opened in April 1917 and, within a few months, the new yards had become a bustling center of a burgeoning local livestock industry. Numerous railroad companies built spur lines to the stockyards to claim a piece of the financial action in transporting animals to the yards and meat products away from the packing plant, but it was the Union Pacific that garnered the lion’s share of the rail traffic; the Denver & Rio Grande Western provided more limited service to the yard. 18 Ultimately, seven rail lines reportedly converged at the stockyards and packing plant, and “trainloads of cattle, sheep, hogs, and horses [were] arriving every day to be placed on the Ogden market.” 19 The Ogden Standard Examiner described the facilities as “the finest stockyards in the entire west,” praising the concrete flooring, drainage, and sewage and water system. 20 Even the Utah Industrial Commission annual report heralded the advanced design of the stockyards in its 1918 report, saying the Ogden facility was “a yard which is about the last word in stockyard construction.” 21
Beginning in 1919, several of the founders of the stockyard, in an effort to boost the profile of the yard and to increase the number of animals brought to the yard and available to the meat packing plant, established the annual Golden Spike National Livestock Show (sometimes referred to as the Livestock Exhibition). As a secondary benefit, the show was to be used to showcase local livestock and “finishing” techniques and to further encourage ranchers of the intermountain region to continually improve the breeding lines of their herds. The show was a rousing success with trainloads of animals being brought in from the western United States to compete for awards. An auction was added to the show almost immediately.
In 1920, the stockyards were reportedly handling up to ten thousand head of livestock “in one day without confusion,” which spoke to the organizational efficiency of the facilities. 22 Six livestock commission firms were said to be operating out of the yards at that time, and the Hansen Livestock and Feeding Company had established a facility nearby where they employed “scientific methods of feeding” to increase animal weight prior to sale. 23 By 1922, the Ogden yards had become one of the largest western markets for cattle, hogs, and sheep, necessitating the construction of a new $30,000 exchange building to house the yard administrators and the growing number of commission firms operating there. These included the firms of Merrion and Wilkins, W. R. Smith and Son, Lowell and Miller, Peck Brothers, John Clay, the Producers Livestock Marketing Association, L. L. Keller, the Farmers Union, the Ogden Auction, and the Alex Patterson Commission Company. 24
An aerial image of the stockyard from 1940, looking southeast. The yard largely sits empty in this photo, in part due to the decrease in activity caused by the Great Depression.
Courtesy of Weber State University Special Collections
Amidst the growth of the stockyard, the Ogden Packing and Provision Company reorganized in 1924 as the American Packing and Provisioning Company. 25 At that time, the company bought control of the stockyards, an ownership they retained until 1935. Under the ownership of the American Packing and Provisioning Company, the stockyards saw one of its greatest periods of improvement and expansion. In 1926, at a cost of $100,000, the company constructed the grand Golden Spike Coliseum, which was designed by the noted Utah architect Leslie Hodgson and housed an auction arena, dance floor, conference room, offices, and a restaurant. 26 The construction of the building, which reportedly took only forty-five days, was necessitated by the success of the annual livestock show and the numbers of visitors attending each year. 27 Funding for the new building came in part through money given to the cause by the Ogden Chamber of Commerce and the Weber County Commission. 28
In 1930, still under the ownership of the American Packing and Provisioning Company, the rail and loading chute network was expanded to accommodate the daily activity of 200 carloads of cattle, 250 carloads of sheep, 150 carloads of hogs, and 100 truckloads of mixed livestock; the Hodgson-designed Sheep Barn was also constructed at this time. 29 The loading area included double-decker chutes that reflected the need for the increased loading and off-loading efficiency of an industrial stockyard. The following year, 1931, the Art Deco–style Exchange Building, also designed by Hodgson, was completed, and the yard itself was expanded to 75 acres that encompassed 30 acres of pens, barns, railroad switches, and 45 acres of buildings, parking, weigh scales, and other facilities. 30
A 1932 edition of the Ogden Livestock Digest, a publication of the livestock show housed at the yards, noted that both the yard and the shows held there had a greater purpose than merely availing themselves of the latest technologies and increasing profits for meat packers. It argued that the show, along with the accompanying yards, was intended to promote advanced methods of feeding livestock that would, in turn, promote sales of local feed and higher local livestock prices based on more robust animals.
Following the passage of a law by the U.S. Congress in 1935 prohibiting packing houses from owning or having financial or legal interest in stockyards, the American Packing and Provisioning Company sold the Ogden Union Stockyards to the Denver Union Stockyard Company, which operated the facility until it closed in 1971. 31
The stockyard experienced a downturn during the years of the Great Depression, seeing an 86 percent decrease in the number of animals passing through the facility between 1930 and 1933. The operations struggled through the ensuing years until the market returned to levels greater than before the Depression during World War II; the peak year of operations in terms of numbers of railroad car loads of livestock unloaded and reloaded at the yard was 1945. With the financial boom created by the wartime demand for meat, the Denver Union Stockyard Company began again to invest in the expansion of the Ogden stockyards. A 1947 Ogden Standard Examiner article noted that the “last of 80 sheep pens being constructed at an expenditure of about $80,000 will be finished within a week” and would have “concrete floors, sewers, mangers, watering troughs and other fittings that can be used the year round.”
Concurrently with the 1947 expansion of the stockyards, the adjacent American Packing and Provisioning Company embarked upon its own $300,000 upgrade, erecting a four-story addition to its plant to increase the slaughter of locally procured sheep from one thousand to ten thousand a week. 32 Most of these animals came directly through the adjacent Ogden Union Stockyard. Two years later, in 1949, Swift and Company bought out the American Packing and Provisioning Company. The final round of known improvement at the stockyard occurred in 1954, making the stockyards the largest single facility west of Denver. 33
Shortly after the final expansion effort, the stockyard operation began a slow but inevitable decline toward obsolescence. By the 1960s, annual sales through the yard had declined to an average of roughly $42 million, less than half of what it had been in its heyday. Perhaps ironically, it was largely technological advancement—the thing that had essentially created the stockyard in the first place—that ultimately led to the demise of the Ogden yard. Advancements in long-haul trucking minimized the need for centralized stockyards at a regional level and resulted in the dispersal of operations to a larger number of small yards located off the nation’s railroad system. Trucks had a much broader distribution range than rail cars since they were not limited to the routes of railroad lines. This flexibility made it possible for live animals to be trucked directly to local feedlots and slaughterhouses, bypassing grand, centralized facilities such as the Ogden Union Stockyard. It also took the distribution of meat products out of the control of railroad companies and livestock commissions—which had acted as brokers between buyers and sellers—and made it possible for ranchers to deal directly with buyers. By the mid-1960s, this fundamental shift in how meat products were distributed across the country relegated the Ogden Union Stockyard to local use, which proved insufficient to sustain the vast complex.
Commission agents operating out of the yard officially closed their operations in December 1967, leaving only local and direct sales to sustain the stockyard. The Ogden Livestock Show and auction continued for a few additional years but with only a fraction of attendees they had once known. The stockyard was officially closed by the Denver Union Stockyard Company on January 31, 1971. 34 The nearby meat packing operation, which was then under the ownership of Swift and Company, shuttered its operations in 1970, shortly after the demise of the stockyard’s main operations. With these final closures, the once-bustling Ogden Union Stockyard slipped into the realm of memories.
NOTES
1 Donald Strack, “Ogden Stockyards and Meat Packing Industry,” Utah Rails, accessed February 2, 2017, at utahrails.net/industries/livestock-ogden.php; Miriam B. Murphy, “The Rise and Fall of Ogden’s Meat Packing Industry,” History Blazer, June 1996; Jalynn Olsen, Building by the Railyard: the Historic Commercial and Industrial Architecture of Ogden, Utah, Western Regional Architecture Publication no. 7 (Salt Lake City: Graduate School of Architecture, 1998).
2 Lewis H. Haney, A Congressional History of Railways in the United States, vol. 2 (New York: Nobel Press, 1908).
3 Swift and Company, The Meat Packing Industry in America (Chicago: Swift and Company, 1920).
4 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992).
5 “The Birth of the Chicago Union Stock Yards,” Chicago Historical Society, accessed August 6, 2014, chicagohs. org/history/stockyard/stock1.html.
6 Robert A. Slayton, Back of the Yards: The Making of Local Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, 1992.
7 Amy J. Fitzgerald, “A Social History of the Slaughterhouse: From Inception to Contemporary Implications,” Human Ecology Review 17, no. 1, (June 2010): 58–69.
8 These acts shaped the design and construction of subsequent stockyards, feed lots, and slaughterhouses across the nation to improve sanitation and animal welfare.
9 J’Nell L. Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards: Livestock Hotels (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 2005).
10 “Big Packing Plant,” Ogden Standard Examiner, March 6, 1916.
11 Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.”
12 Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”
13 Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.”
14 O. J. Stillwell, “O. J. Stillwell Reviews Ogden’s Development as a Livestock Center during the Past Four Years,” Ogden Standard Examiner, February 14, 1920; Murphy, “The Rise and Fall.”
15 “Contracts Let for the Construction of Stock Yards across River,” Ogden Standard Examiner, October 28, 1916.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”
19 “Latest Picture of Union Stock Yards and Ogden Packing Yards,” Ogden Standard Examiner, May 12, 1917. See also, Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 146.
20 “Latest Picture of Union Stock Yards,” May 12, 1917.
21 Utah Industrial Commission, Report of the Utah Industrial Commission for the Period of July 1, 1917–June 30, 1918 (Salt Lake City: F. W. Gardiner, 1918).
22 Stillwell, “O. J. Stillwell Reviews,” February 14, 1920.
23 Ibid.
24 Jesse S. Richards, “A History of Ogden Yards,” Ogden Standard Examiner, December 31, 1922; Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147; Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”
25 Donald Strack, “Major Rail-Served Industries in Ogden,” Utah Rails, accessed May 30, 2016, at utahrails. net/ogden/ogden-industry.php.
26 Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 146; Wayne L. Balle, Ogden Union Stockyards, Historic Site Form, 1992, on file at the Utah State Historic Preservation Office, Salt Lake City, Utah.
27 “Ogden’s New Livestock Show Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 2, 1926.
28 “$15,000 Given for Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, September 29, 1925; “Grants $5,000 to Coliseum,” Ogden Standard Examiner, January 3, 1926.
29 Balle, Ogden Union Stockyards; Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147.
30 Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147.
31 Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”
32 Strack, “Ogden Stockyards.”
33 Pate, America’s Historic Stockyards, 147.
34 Ibid., 148.
