Margaret Walsh
The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry
1982
Synopsis: Walsh follows up on her 1972 book, The Manufacturing Frontier, with a look at the transition (between 1840-1870 more or less) of pork processing from a local, part-time activity to an industry. She says “pork packing is a good tool of analysis because agricultural processing early disseminated an industrial experience to newly settled farming country.” (ix) But also, it seems obvious, because primary processing is industry. I wonder if similar work has been done yet on flour milling, lumber, tanning, cooperage, and especially brewing and distilling? By 1870, Walsh says, the midwest was already “responsible for 27 percent of the nation’s value added.” (3) Cronon notwithstanding, a lot of that took place outside Chicago.
Early packers were usually merchants in towns like Chillicothe, Hamilton, Circleville, Ripley, and Maysville Ohio, Terre Haute and Lafayette Indiana. (17, see maps) Although she doesn’t elaborate much on the farmers raising these swine, Walsh says by the 1840s they had moved past semi-wild “razorbacks” to “foreign pigs, such as the Suffolk, Berkshire, Yorkshire, Irish Grazier, Poland, Essex, Chinese, and Chester Whites...They debated the merits of the different breeds...[and knew] the defects of particular strains could be countered by crossbreeding, a practice that most farmers quickly advocated” (19, sources for this include Towne and Wentworth, Clemen, H.D. Emery, Arny, and The Prairie Farmer -- see biblio). A closer look at the supply side of pork packing would help explain what was happening on farms during this period. Walsh shows farmers were making business decisions about the market by the 1840s, calculating “the value of corn when sold in the form of pork” to determine whether to fatten hogs or sell their grain. (23) This calculation required knowledge of feeding yields and prices, but also of transportation costs and risks; and it involved guesswork about demand in faraway markets. So, farmers needed to be aware of the wider world even before the railroads came to town.
The operational costs Walsh reports (or estimates) for even a medium scale packing operation were substantial. Fixed costs were low (especially relative to “machinery plants or textile factories”), but the cost of hogs meant that a “country pork merchant in the Middle Ohio Valley in the mid-1840s might need $45,000 to process 6,000 hogs.” (27) The “city capitalist in Cincinnati, Louisville, or Madison might process 15,000 hogs...[and] needed between $100,000 and $125,000 to carry out his season’s work in the mid-1840s.” (28) This suggests two things. City packers had the backing of capitalists (Walsh traces several of these formal and informal relationships), and rural packers had extensive networks of trust and credit. Assuming the average general store owner could not raise the money to do a cash business, his ability to pack hogs testified to extremely solid relationships between farmers, packers, and possibly retailers in remote cities.
Some early rural pork found its way into international markets. Walsh says “in the 1830s the United States replaced Ireland as the world’s leading source of cheap provisions.” By the 1840s “bacon and ham exports alone reached 166 million pounds.” (36) Shipments of processed pork were made easier by the growth of the rail network. But the same trains that carried barrels could carry live animals, and the railroads led to gradual consolidation of the industry to higher volume centers. Even with the growth of regional packing in Madison IN (63,000 hogs in 1845-6), Louisville KY (67,000), and Cincinnati (246,000), smaller packing centers like Burlington IA (24,000 hogs/yr in the late 1850s), Muscatine IA (28,000), Keokuk IA (35,000) and Terre Haute IN (47,000) remained strong suppliers. (45, 94) “In the mid-1840s the Queen City’s [Cincinnati’s] annual output of 230,000 hogs produced 22 percent of the region’s total pack.” (48) Even by the late 1850s, the four major centers (Cincinnati, Lousville, Chicago and St. Louis) accounted for less than 40 percent of the region’s pack. (94) Pork remained an important local business after the Civil War, if the experience of what Walsh calls “secondary midwestern points” is any indication. Between 1858 and 1877, many of these saw level or increasing production, with Des Moines and Cedar Rapids growing from zero to a combined total of over 200,000 hogs. (table, 68)
Part of this regional growth was the result of packers leaving centers like Chicago in the 1870s. They brought capital and technology to smaller cities like Cedar Rapids and Ottumwa (Thomas Sinclair & Co. and John Morrell & Co., respectively), in a third phase of growth that might be called exurban industrialism (which continues in places like Worthington MN). Ice packing allowed “Midwestern outputs” to increase “fivefold, from 495,714 hogs in 1872 to 2,543,120 hogs in 1877” by making packing a year-round process. (85) In the 1880s and 1890s, major packers diversified into beef, using refrigerated freight cars. Walsh does not describe the process, but says this led directly to “Big business...in the shape of the Big Five” companies that dominated meat processing in the 20th century (Armour, Swift, Wilson, Morris, and Cudahay Packing). In what might be the only weak point in the book, Walsh suggests Yeager (1981) for the details of this change.
Critics: Universally positive, with the exception of a cranky Chicago labor historian who wanted a social history rather than an economic history.
Selected References:
Primary:
Willard Barrows, Notes on Iowa Territory (1845)
Rufus Blanchard, Handbook of Iowa, (1869)
James Buckingham, The Eastern and Western States of America (1842)
William Chambers, Things as they Are in America (1854)
Chapman, Handbook of Wisconsin (1855)
Charles G. Colby, Handbook of Illinois (1854)
Joseph H. Colton, the State of Indiana Delineated (1838)
Commercial directory of the Western States and Rivers (1867)
Daniel S. Curtiss, Western Portraiture and Emigrants’ Guide (1852)
John Disturnell, the Travelers’ Guide through the State of Illinois (1838)
Simeon de W. Drown, Drown’s Record and Historical Review of Peoria (1851)
Edwards’ Descriptive Gazeteer and Commercial Directory of the Mississippi Valley (1860)
Ensign and Thayer’s Travellers’ Guide through the States of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois... (1852)
Fred Gerhard, Illinois as it is (1857)
James Hall, Statistics of the West, (1836)
Joseph T. Holmes, Quincy in 1857
Illinois State Business directory, 1860
The Indiana Gazeteer or Topographical Dictionary (1826)
Indiana Gazeteer or Topographical Directory (1849)
National Convention of Pork Packers and Provision Dealers, Proceedings of the National Convention (1873)
John B. Newhall, The British Emigrants’ Hand Book and Guide to the New States of America (1844)
William Rees, The Mississippi Bridge Cities, Davenport, Rock Island and Moline (1854)
United States Federal Trade Commission, Report on the Meat Packing Industry (1919)
William Youatt, The Pig: A Treatise on the Breeds, Management, Feeding and Medical Treatment of Swine (1847)
(check by state for railroad guides, business directories, portraits, memorials, gazeteers, handbooks, “as it is,” etc.)
Secondary:
Lewis E. Atherton, The Pioneer Merchant in Mid-America (1939)
Bidwell and Falconer
Richard O. Cummings, The American Ice Harvests (1949)
Danhof
Gilbert Fite, The Farmer’s Frontier (1966)
Sam B. Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: A Food Supply in the Old South, 1840-1860 (1972)
John A. Hopkins, Economic History of the Production of Beef Cattle in Iowa (1928)
Henry C. Hubbard, The Older Middle West (1936)
Louis C. Hunter, Studies in the Economic History of the Ohio Valley: Seasonal Aspects of Industry and Commerce Before the Age of Big Business (1935)
A.L. Kohlmeier, The Old Northwest (1938)
Eric E. Lampard, The Rise of the Dairy Industry in Wisconsin (1963)
Isaac Lippincott, A History of Manufactures in the Ohio Valley to the Year 1860 (1914)
Wilbur T. Norton, Centennial History of Madison County (1912)
Glenn Porter, Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth Century Marketing (1971)
Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy (1969)
Thomas B. Searight, The Old Pike: A History of the National Road (1894)
Fred A. Shannon, The Farmers’ Last Frontier (1945)
James W. Thompson, A History of Livestock Raising in the United States (1942)
Charles W. Towne, Pigs from Cave to Cornbelt (1950)
Richard C. Wade, The Urban Frontier: The Rise of Western Cities, 1790-1830 (1959)
James W. Whitaker, Feedlot Empire (1975)
David F. Wilcox, Quincy and Adams County History (1919)
Mary Yeager, Competition and Regulation: The Development of Oligopoly in the Meat Packing Industry
Articles:
Mordecai Ezekiel, “The Cobweb Theorem” 1938
Paul C. Heinlein, “Cattle Driving from the Ohio Country” 1954
Harry L. Wilkby, “Infant Industries in Illinois as Illustrated in Quincy” 1939
Mentioned in:
Nature’s Metropolis
