6. The Union Stock Yard Gate in Chicago is a National Historic Landmark
All that remains of the Union Stock Yard in Chicago is the stone gate which was erected in 1879. It marked the entry to the meat processing district which made Chicago the largest meatpacking center in the world at the turn of the twentieth century. Seven decades later the famed stockyards closed. What is largely forgotten is that the stockyards were built, not by the meatpackers as is often assumed, but by the railroads. It grew to encompass 475 acres of land, and employed 45,000 people at its peak, butchering more than 400 million animals between the end of the American Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century. The stockyards gave rise to American meatpacking giants such as Armour and Swift, and helped launch other industries as well.
Leather, soap, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, gelatins, and other products were all manufactured from the byproducts of the meatpacking industry, which also built the industrial might of the railroads. Following the Second World War advances in the trucking industry, including refrigerated trailers, made it cheaper to butcher animals regionally than ship them live to a central location for butchering and then ship them again to markets as beef, pork, and lamb. By the 1960s both Swift and Armour had abandoned their operations and in 1971 the stockyards were closed. They were demolished beginning later that year, a process which took eight months to complete. Only the stone gate remains to mark a major portion of the history of Chicago and the development of industry in the United States.