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8 unusual facts about Union Stock Yards


Butterfield Cobblestone House

According to local tradition, it reflected Joseph's success in the Chicago stockyards and the farm he owned in Marengo, Iowa.

Chew on This

It is basically, as the title says, "everything you don't want to know about fast food," such as the way chickens die at a slaughterhouse, how meatpacking has become more dangerous than back in the times of the Chicago Stock Yards, cutting approximately 400 cattle an hour, and how the average child sees approximately 40,000 advertisements a year, half of which are for fast food, candy, breakfast cereals, and soda.

Conrad Kohrs

Initially, he used it to hold the beef that was supplying his own operations, but eventually built the operation up until, at its peak, it owned 50,000 head of cattle, grazing on 10 million acres (40,000 km²), spread across four states and two Canadian Provinces and shipping 10,000 head of cattle annually to the Chicago stock yards.

Cubs–White Sox rivalry

Royko once wrote that the reason Sox fans have a "bad attitude" is that when they would go to games at Comiskey Park, the stench of the Union Stock Yards would fill their nostrils and remind them of the status of their team.

Harry Sternberg

Life for the workers in Chicago’s stockyards and steel mills was graphically described in 1906 by Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle and the Lakeview mural captures much of this history.

Jimmy Archer

He received a medal from the National Safety Council in 1931 after using prone pressure resuscitation to revive two truck drivers who had been overcome by carbon monoxide in the Union Stock Yards.

Sue Carol

As a young woman, Carol married Allen H. Keefer, a buyer for a Chicago stock yard firm, divorcing in early 1929.

Thompson-LaGarde Tests

The tests were conducted at the Nelson Morris Company Union Stock Yards in Chicago, Illinois, using both live cattle outside a local slaughterhouse, as well as some human cadavers.


Lithuanians in the Chicago area

The Lithuanian community in Chicago was most famously immortalized by Upton Sinclair in his 1906 novel about the treatment of workers in the Chicago stock yards, The Jungle, whose story revolves around telling the life of a Lithuanian immigrant named Jurgis Rudkus.


see also