How come when we reminisce about something favorable from the past we only think of the good parts? I reckon it’s senior nostalgia, but I recall as a kid thinking what a great place the Chicago stockyards must be. All those steers, hogs and sheep coming in on railroad cars from all over the country and leaving out as steak, bacon and chops; I wanted to see it. The stockyards shut down in 1971, but guess what happened the year before? Yep, I got to go there as a college student cleaning up behind show cattle at the International Livestock Exposition. I wish I would have had my cellphone camera in my pocket, but then again, it was 1970.

The correct name was Union Stockyards and it was built by railroad companies just about Civil War time as a livestock shipping and gathering place. All the big meatpacking outfits built slaughterhouses within “the yards.” Though boarded up when I got there, I got to see those huge brick buildings with the names “Armour”, “Swift”, “Cudahy” and “Wilson” in faded paint on their sides. Well before Henry Ford invented the assembly line, the Chicago meat processors created the “disassembly line” whereby a hog could be disassembled in fifteen minutes moving down a line of knife-wielding employees.

At one time Union Stockyards was the jobsite for up to 40,000 mostly immigrant workers in meatpacking and livestock marketing and all the adjacent hotels, restaurants, salons, and supporting businesses. I sat in one of the Herford hide chairs in the old Stockyard Inn hotel. The stockyard’s business also gave rise to livestock futures trading and its headquarters, The Chicago Mercantile Exchange. I visited “The Merc” a couple of times later on the job.

Like I said, it’s the good things we like to remember. The stockyards of Chicago sure had downsides. The south fork of the Chicago River became known as “Bubbly Creek” because of constant gas bubbling caused by decomposition of animal blood and guts. The city actually diverted the flow of the entire river to keep slaughterhouse contamination out of Lake Michigan, the city’s source of drinking water.

Also, the meatpacking industry back then was not exactly a clean and safe environment for workers. In fact, one of the most famous bits of labor union history in the United States is a book titled The Jungle written in 1906 that told of the dirty and unsafe conditions endured by workers at the Chicago meatpacking plants.

Many of us first learned of The Jungle in high school civics class. I still recall that dadblamed fill-in-the-blank question on one exam in 10th grade Civics; “___ _______ was the title of Upton Sinclair’s book about working conditions at Chicago meatpackers that helped lead to the American labor movement.”

Though I couldn’t think of title for the world, I wanted the teacher to know I remembered that lesson. Thinking back on one particular gross thing in the book, I proudly filled in the wrong answer, Fingers in the Meat Grinder.

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Terry Rector writes for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District, 601-636-7679 ext. 3.