A Fire Strikes the Chicago Stock Yards

A History of Flame and Folly in the Jungle

John F Hogan, Alex A. Burkholder

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781614238621
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This compelling history chronicles some of the most intense and tragic fires in Chicago's storied meatpacking district.

Chicago's Union Stock Yards made the city "the hog butcher of the world, " but the notoriety came at a grievous cost. From their opening on Christmas Day of 1865 to their final closure in July of 1971, The Yards were the site of nearly three hundred extra-alarm fires. That infamous history includes some of the most disastrous conflagrations of a city famous for fire.

In 1910, twenty-one firemen and three civilians were killed in a blaze at a beef warehouse—the largest death toll for an organized fire department in the nation prior to 9/11. The meatpackers who ran the yards considered the constant threat of fire as part of the cost of doing business, shrugging it off with an, "It's all right, we're fully covered." For the firefighters who were forced to plunge into the flames again and again, it was an entirely different matter.

Chapter 1

LIFE IN THE JUNGLE

Historians and social critics have written volumes about the notorious working and living conditions in the Chicago Union Stock Yards and surrounding neighborhoods. Upton Sinclair’s 1906 exposé The Jungle riveted the nation’s attention on the inhuman and inhumane environment, impelling President Theodore Roosevelt to initiate action that resulted in the Pure Food and Drug Act. One hazard that seems to have evaded similar scrutiny, not to mention significant remedial attention, was the continuous threat of serious fire.

Chicago’s Union Stock Yards arguably constituted the most combustible urban square mile in the United States, if not the entire planet. From its earliest days, sections of the yards regularly went up in flames. The meatpackers seemed to consider fire a way of life, a cost of doing business. “It’s all right, we’re fully covered” became a typical reaction.

From 1889, when Chicago annexed the suburban town of Lake that contained the yards, until the horrendous fire of December 1910, the Chicago Fire Department responded to 68 extra alarms alone, nearly half in the vicinity of the 1910 fire site. Lessons learned? Steps taken? The record speaks for itself. After 1910, 224 extra alarms occurred in the yards, including some that happened after packing operations ceased in 1971, but the buildings remained, vacant or utilized in other ways. The total 292 extra-alarm fires include the 1934 inferno that was stopped just short of replicating the Great Fire of 1871. The Great Fire spared the yards, which conducted business as usual, seemingly oblivious that the center city was burning to the ground. The number of all fires in Stock Yards history is incalculable because “still and box” alarms, those transmitted by “snap boxes,” telephone or other means that didn’t summon additional manpower, normally didn’t get recorded. In other situations, proud, headstrong officers at the scene refused to concede the need for extra help. How many non-extras broke out can only be imagined.

Even after the closing of the Union Stock Yards in 1971, major fires were fought in buildings under demolition. Courtesy of the Chicago Fire Department.

Over the years, recommendations for improvements in fire protection, firefighting and water supply were greeted with the same indifference as those for improvements in meeting basic human needs, such as a living wage, sanitation, adequate nutrition, housing, child welfare and so on. The packers showed greater reliance on a taxpayer-financed fire department than on costly investments to lessen fire hazards. “A pervasive desire to make money tainted the city’s culture and philosophy,” observes Robert A. Slayton in Back of the Yards—The Making of a Local Democracy. Thomas J. Jablonsky, author of Pride in the Jungle—Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago, notes, “The focus for at least the first half-century [of the yards’ existence] was on developing that enterprise. As for the poor unfortunates who lived nearby, they simply had to take their chances.” As did the firemen who had to respond to the all-too-frequent alarms.

Fire safety in the yards, even for those who worked there, took a back seat to more urgent grievances of “the poor unfortunates.” They found themselves afflicted—day in, day out, with no break on Sundays—by the Four Horsemen of the Packingtown Apocalypse: smoke, stench, noise and pathogens.

Sinclair described his Lithuanian immigrant characters arriving in Packingtown to find “half a dozen chimneys, tall as the tallest buildings, touching the very sky—and leaping from them half a dozen columns of smoke, thick, oily and black as night. It was inexhaustible; one stared, waiting to see it stop, but still the great streams rolled out. They spread in vast clouds overhead, writhing, curling, then, uniting in one giant river, they streamed away down from the sky, stretching a black pall as far as the eye could see.” With his graphic descriptions, Sinclair hardly seemed given to understatement, but in this instance, his mention of “six chimneys” falls a bit short. The skyline was dotted with giant brick smokestacks, starting with the twin towers of the yards’ power plant at Thirty-ninth Street. Along with a never-ending haze came an equally constant downpour of soot.

The haze and soot mingled with the odor of dozens of slaughterhouses; tens of thousands of penned cattle, hogs, sheep and horses; fertilizer plants; rendering vats; garbage dumps; tanneries; and trash-filled alleys. According to Jablonsky, the most notorious source of stench was the Darling and Company rendering plant at Forty-second and Ashland, where “open wagons loaded with bone bits, damaged hides, dead cats and dogs, leftover meat from the local butcher shops, and ‘big gobs of fat’ collected around the main plant. The vehicles would sit in the sun, smelling up the whole neighborhood.” Ironically, Sunday was the most malodorous day of the week throughout Packingtown. That was cleaning day at the packinghouses, when workers used steam blasts instead of water to cleanse the slaughterhouse floors and blood vats.

Residents tried to ignore the ongoing bombardment or at least tolerate it as best they could as the price of earning a livelihood, meager as it was. Visitors gagged and sometimes became ill. Astonishing as it may seem, the Stock Yards became a major tourist attraction. The Tribune wrote in 1875 that visitors to Chicago would no more think of leaving without having seen the yards as “the traveler would of visiting Egypt and not the pyramids; Rome and not the Coliseum; Pisa without the Leaning Tower.” The attraction demonstrated staying power. In 1893, the year of the World’s Columbian Exposition, more than one million visitors took the guided tours of the yards and packinghouses. One tourist found the experience as popular as and far more entertaining than a ride on the Ferris wheel.

A further assault on the senses that the residents came to accept was the clatter of cattle and boxcars at all hours as they brought in the livestock and moved out the finished products. By 1910, the yards contained three hundred miles of railroad tracks to go with thirteen thousand pens, twenty-five miles of streets and fifty miles of sewers.

The largest, albeit unofficial, sewer presented the most egregious of all the environmental insults. Aptly named Bubbly Creek, this waterway constituted the South Fork of the Chicago River’s South Branch. At Twenty-fifth Street, the South Branch took a swing to the southwest, where it split into two forks at Ashland. The South Fork ran along the northern end of the former Stock Yards to Western Avenue near Fortieth Street. In the early 1870s, the Stock Yard Company had this segment dredged to become the Union Stock Yard Canal Slip, which was to receive heavy cargo delivered by Lake Michigan vessels. The plan failed because the current at that point was virtually nonexistent, and therefore the slip couldn’t accommodate the sailing ships of the era. So, the packers found another use.

A total of nineteen companies began dumping enormous quantities of wastes into a stream that couldn’t flush itself. Year after year, the pollutants piled up, despite periodic dredging. Between 1900 and 1921, the riverbed rose at a rate of nearly half a foot a year under the accumulation of more than 130,000 pounds of “suspended matter” daily, the equivalent waste of one million humans, according to one estimate. Decaying matter at the bottom released bubbles of gas sometimes exceeding a foot in diameter—six feet, if hyperbolic accounts are to be believed—giving birth to the stream’s moniker. The slimy water, home to multitudes of flies and mosquitoes, was so dense it never froze. One resident said it looked like a street that had been freshly tarred. Sometimes it caught fire and the fire department had to be called.

Following the annexation of Lake Township by the city in 1889, the offensive and dangerous gases rising from Bubbly Creek, along with the cries of outrage rising from its neighbors, became Chicago’s problem. The new overseers responded the same way their predecessors did—with feigned concern but few corrective measures.

Swelled by immigration and suburban annexation, Chicago’s population from 1870 to 1900 grew from just under 300,000 in a space of 35 square miles to 1.7 million living in 190 square miles. Over the next thirty years, the population doubled again. This explosion mirrored that of business at the yards. Between 1870 and 1890, Chicago’s meatpacking industry grew by 900 percent and by 1900 represented the city’s largest industrial employer. From thirty-nine plants with 25,000 workers at the turn of the century, the Stock Yards enterprise ballooned to forty-six plants with more than 45,000 workers by the end of World War I. Ominously, a city engineer wrote in 1901 that the explosion in area, population and manufacturing threatened to outstrip the city water distribution system’s ability to keep pace.

From its earliest days, the Stock Yard Company scrambled to keep millions of gallons of water a day flowing to meet the needs of humans, animals and machines. Initially, the company sank six artesian wells. When these proved insufficient by the early 1870s, the Towns of Lake and Hyde Park teamed up to open a waterworks on the lakefront that fed the yards from two mains. Eventually, the company enlarged the mains on its property, upgraded its water storage tanks and added new pumping machinery. With annexation in 1889, the City of Chicago acquired the Lake–Hyde Park water system and the right to bill the Stock Yards for its intake and assumed primary responsibility for firefighting.

Dissatisfied with the Town of Lake’s often unreliable volunteer fire department, the company in 1874 established a full-time brigade, built a fire station and bought a new fire steamer, dubbed the “Liberty Engine.” According to Louise Carroll Wade, author of Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown and Environs in the Nineteenth Century, the engine and its crew “fought many a blaze in the yards, the packinghouse district to the west of the stockyard and elsewhere in Lake and even Hyde Park.” Lake got around to establishing a full-time, paid fire department in 1882. A marshal and eighteen trained firefighters took over from the volunteers. At the time of annexation, the Lake department consisted of eighty-five men, seven steamers, three hook and ladders, two hose carts and forty horses.

Looking back on an era generally considered more religious than contemporary times, it’s difficult to understand why a group of railroad and packing tycoons chose Christmas Day to hold the opening ceremony of a slaughterhouse operation destined to become Chicago’s largest industrial employer. Most, if not all, of the founders were stalwarts of one Protestant denomination or another. (The Stock Yards workforce was overwhelmingly Catholic.) Nonetheless, on December 25, 1865, a consortium of eleven railroads and eight packing firms launched the Chicago Union Stock Yard Company, with “Yard” soon becoming pluralized in common usage. The new operation consolidated a number of smaller stockyards scattered throughout the city and surrounding towns that were providing meat for Union troops during the Civil War. Although the war effort factored into the decision to build the Union Stock Yards, the fighting had ended by Christmas Day 1865. Financially, the end of the war didn’t have much impact on the new enterprise. In or out of uniform, Americans consumed meat. The yards accepted its first livestock shipment December 26, and the arrivals continued each day, almost uninterrupted, until the place closed 106 years later. Lest someone infer any irreverence in the Christmas Day opening, a brief history of the operation, published by the Stock Yard Company in 1951, casts the founders as respectful men. Many “were close personal friends of Abraham Lincoln and set aside their activities in building the yards to accompany his body to Springfield for the final rites.”

The yards got built quickly. Work began in June 1864 and proceeded through an unusually hot summer, well before the company obtained a state charter in February 1865. The site selected by the organizers was a 320-acre swampland close to the river, removed for the time being from residential districts and acquired for the reasonable price of $100,000 from Congressman and former Chicago mayor “Long John” Wentworth. The reservation extended from Thirty-ninth to Forty-seventh Streets, Halsted Street to Ashland Avenue. An additional 25 acres were added later. One extra advantage made the site attractive to its purchasers: since it fell well outside the city limits, companies could avoid paying taxes to Chicago.

Throughout 1864–65, a force of nearly one thousand workers, many recently discharged by the Union army, dug ditches and wells and constructed buildings, sheds and wooden livestock pens, including double-decker pens for sheep and hogs. The pens, crisscrossed by railroad tracks, occupied roughly the eastern half of the site, between Halsted and Racine, with the packinghouses to the west, from Racine to Ashland. The livestock enclosures, crammed with thousands of animals and bales of hay, seemed to extend to the horizon. They stood separated by narrow pathways, adequate for leading livestock to slaughter but daunting to firefighters attempting to navigate the labyrinth with hoses or engines. In the judgment of the National Board of Fire Underwriters, the configuration of the pens created “very large fire areas.” Most everything constructed in the yards consisted of wood, a condition that changed little throughout the years.

The Old Stone Gate, once the main entrance to the Union Stock Yards, is now a Chicago landmark. John F. Hogan.

In its August 1912 report (nearly a half-century after the yards opened), the insurance group concluded, “The problem of wooden interior construction [in] many excessive areas, the hazardous nature of its occupancies and congestion of the section combine to create an excessive potential hazard.” The probability of sweeping fires, the report determined, was reduced by the effectiveness of the yards’ watch service, private protection and considerable window protection: “However, in individual [and groups of] buildings, fires involving very high and quickly consumable values in buildings and contents are probable. As the water supply for the packinghouse section is decidedly inadequate, the possibility of sweeping fire occurring is very high.” In an uncanny prologue to publication of the underwriters’ findings, the district’s famed Transit House hotel and restaurant, a six-story brick structure, burned to the ground on January 5, 1912.

One is left to wonder who read these reports. The insurance organization’s conclusions were published a year and a half after twenty-one firemen lost their lives in the Nelson Morris fire. Some of the exact sentences reappear in an underwriters’ report more than ten years later! It was as if the fire of 1871 never happened or its lessons were never learned. The 1912 indictment of the yards further stated:

Adequate protection for the Stock Yards District by fire engines and the present facilities is hopeless; the [water] consumption of the packinghouses is so enormous that the mains within the District are barely sufficient for ordinary requirements and leave scant margin for fire purposes at times of unusually heavy consumption; the type of hydrant is unsatisfactory, and the crowded condition of the yards does not give room for the suitable concentration of many engines. The inflammable nature of the contents of many of the buildings makes quickness of getting into operation of prime importance.

The Stock Yards as seen from the air in the 1930s. Large meatpacking plants crammed together on the west end and sprawling animal pens to the east created a perfect atmosphere for fires. Chicago History Museum, #ICHi-04091.

The underwriters urged installation of a high-pressure water system “at an early date,” a step that Chief Fire Marshal Horan kept pleading for until literally hours before his death.

Water pressure continued to pose a problem for years to come, primarily due to city inertia. The packers had proposed plans to build pipes, tunnels and pumping stations so they could control their own supplies. These overtures were rejected by the city, which wanted to maintain its dominant position. In any event, the lion’s share of water flowing to that part of town—seven million gallons on a hot day—continued to quench the rapacious thirst of the yards.

Readers of Sinclair’s The Jungle recoiled as the author took them inside a Chicago packinghouse:

There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage. There would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white—it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption. There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs. There would be meat stored in great piles in rooms, and the water from the leaky roofs would drip over it, and thousands of rats would race about on it. It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of meat and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats.

The national revulsion, personified by President Roosevelt, produced a mini domino effect. Appalled by what he read, Roosevelt appointed a special committee to investigate conditions at the Chicago Stock Yards. Then the City of Chicago followed suit—sort of. The president sent the committee’s report to Congress with a call for immediate remedial action. Describing the conditions as revolting, Roosevelt proposed a law that would empower federal inspectors to supervise the preparation of meat products “from the hoof to the can.” His request resulted in speedy passage and enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act, once Congress had digested the contents of the inspectors’ findings.

The report that the president transmitted to Capitol Hill on June 4, 1906, while not specifically covering fire safety, described a massive firetrap. Wooden viaducts and platforms became the final resting places of calves, sheep and hogs that had died en route to the killing floors. “The only excuse given for the delay in removal was that so often heard—the expense,” the report stated. The inspectors found the interiors of most buildings were composed of wood, as were partition walls, supports, rafters and most floors, which were often slime-coated. Everywhere they looked, they found wooden worktables, tubs and other receptacles, meat-hauling carts and “dirty, blood-soaked, rotting wooden floors.” Not one establishment afforded adequate workroom ventilation. Many windowless food preparation rooms “may be best described as vaults in which the air rarely changes.” Everywhere they noticed accumulations of dirt, grease and meat scraps. The inspectors found themselves particularly appalled by conditions in the employee restrooms, women’s as well as men’s, which often lacked separating partitions. Toilet areas usually vented into the workrooms, with no openings to allow outside air. Bathrooms that sometimes doubled as cloakrooms often bordered lunchrooms. Since the wooden partitions that partly enclosed the toilet areas stopped short of the ceilings, workers on a meal break could receive some unattractive aromas to accompany their sandwiches. Worst of all, in the team’s opinion, employees re...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Life in the Jungle
• 2. The Great Fire Was Only the Start
• 3. Death in a Very Small Place
• 4. A City in Mourning
• 5. Horan and Custer
• 6. Prophets without Honor
• 7. The Flames that Almost Swallowed Chicago
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• About the Authors