The Omaha Stockyards

Contents

1. How the yards were organized
2. Why the packers came
3. A hotel for stock
4. South Omaha as its own city
5. The people on the line
6. The peak years
7. Farmers and the market
8. How the market changed form
9. What changed and what did not

Brent O’Mara works and lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where for much of the twentieth century the busiest place in the city was measured in head of livestock received per day. Head is the unit. A stockyard counted cattle, hogs and sheep as they came off the railcars, sold them by the hundredweight of live weight on a scale ticket, and charged a yardage fee for each animal it fed and watered in the meantime. KETV reports that the yards opened in 1884 with 7,000 head of cattle and that in the peak years of the late 1940s 7.7 million head came through in a year, on more than 250 acres.² The other units were acres, packing plants and people, and the entry takes them in turn.

How the yards were organized

A 1983 article in Nebraska History by the historian Harmon Mothershead explains that the first stockyards along the Missouri were railroad watering yards for cattle in transit, and that the real business began when local investors persuaded big packers to slaughter near the source rather than in Chicago. Omaha’s first attempt, in 1876, failed for lack of support. In 1883 a Wyoming cattleman named Alexander Swan organized the South Omaha Land Syndicate and then, on December 1, the Union Stock Yards Company, which bought about 156 acres from the syndicate at $500 an acre.¹

Why the packers came

The articles of incorporation covered feeding, selling and buying livestock but also slaughtering, packing and shipping meat by refrigerated car, and the directors spent January 1885 in Chicago, New York and Boston looking for packers. They built and leased plants, loaned money, and in 1886 gave a Chicago packing company eleven acres and $200,000 to open a plant. Only then, the article says, did beef slaughter begin on a scale large enough to assure the success of the yards.¹

Figure

The yards from founding to closing

1. 01
   1883The Union Stock Yards Company of Omaha is organized on December 1 and buys about 156 acres from a land syndicate at $500 an acre.
2. 02
   1884The yards open beside a railhead in the separate town of South Omaha, with 7,000 head of cattle in the first year.
3. 03
   1886A Chicago packer accepts eleven acres and $200,000 to build a plant, and beef slaughter begins on a scale large enough to carry the yards.
4. 04
   1955Omaha passes Chicago as the nation's meatpacking center and holds the title into the 1970s.
5. 05
   1999What is left of the Union Stockyards closes; the 1926 Livestock Exchange Building survives.

A hotel for stock

Mothershead’s phrase for the business is a hotel for transient stock. Commission firms received the animals, ordered feed and offered them for sale; a buyer and a salesman agreed a price per hundred pounds by a word or a nod; the stock went to the scale house and the ticket fixed the total. Records from the St. Joseph yards show the hotel side earned under ten cents a head, so the yards needed millions of animals a year to meet expenses, and lived on switching fees and exchange building rents besides.¹ The packers held the stock of the yard companies in return for building plants, until the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 separated them.¹

South Omaha as its own city

The yards abutted a railhead in what was then a separate town. The Omaha World Herald records that within a few years meatpacking was Omaha’s biggest industry and that tens of thousands of immigrants, Polish and Czech and Irish among them, surged into South Omaha to work the kill floors.³ By 1909 the city of South Omaha held 35,000 people from 27 countries, according to KETV, and Omaha annexed it in 1915.²

The people on the line

The work was dirty and dangerous. In the 1918 influenza pandemic more than a quarter of the nearly 1,000 Omahans who died were packinghouse workers, and two weeks after the first case about 15 percent of the 9,000 laborers at the four big plants were out sick.³ After immigration from Europe was cut off in 1924, the plants hired African Americans moving north; unions strengthened by 1930s labor law won wages that made the job a living.³

Figure

The yards by the numbers

head of cattle in the peak year of the late 1940s

7.7 million

acres covered by the yards

250

laborers at the four big packing plants in 1918

9,000

meatpacking jobs in Omaha in 2019

8,748

The peak years

KMTV’s account of 1953 sets the stockyards’ peak in a year when Omaha’s population was just over 300,000.⁸ In 1955 Omaha passed Chicago as the nation’s meatpacking center, and that year 42,817 cattle came through the gates in a single day.³ Nebraska Public Media’s history series tells how the South Omaha yards overtook Chicago as the largest livestock market in the country.⁶ KETV dates the title of largest stockyard in the world from 1955 to 1971.²

Farmers and the market

Because the yards set prices for the region, they were also a place of protest. In September 1964 the Associated Press reported that demonstrators from the National Farmers Organization, between 1,500 and 2,000 by the police count, closed what it called the nation’s biggest livestock market for six of its busiest hours, seeking contracts that gave farmers a voice in price.⁴ The city timeline places the Union Stockyards under 1883 and notes the yards covered more than 210 acres.⁷

How the market changed form

The decline came from a new way of packing. A former Omaha cattle buyer took charge of an upstart Iowa packer in the 1960s, built smaller plants in small towns close to the feedlots, shipped boxed beef instead of carcasses and replaced skilled butchers with lower paid labor; by 1982 the industry’s wages began a long fall.³ The yards tried to adapt. In February 1985 the New York Times noted the first video auction at the Livestock Exchange Building, where 7,015 head stayed on their ranches while buyers watched them on a screen.⁵

What changed and what did not

What closed in 1999 was a market, not an industry. The Livestock Exchange Building of 1926 stood empty until 2005 and now holds apartments and community services.² Meatpacking employment in Omaha was 8,748 in 2019, a third of the state total and about what it was a century earlier, and new immigrants still fill the plants.³ What changed is where the animals are sold and how the family that raises them, the subject of farm and ranch transfers and farmland values, reaches a buyer. What did not change is that the railroad that brought the first cattle still runs through the city.