The "‘hog butcher of the world” has already wiped

The "‘hog butcher of the world” has already wiped his knife. Now the cattle pens have been prodded empty of their last steer. Tlie “Stormy, husky, brawling City of the big shoulders ’’--another of Carl Sandburg’s nicknames for Chicago-has shoved shut the gate at its famous stock yards. After 105 years of turning out enough sides of beef, hams, and legs of lamb and mutton to feed the American nation of meateaters, the stock yards have given way to demands for more efficiency, the National Geographic Society says. Ten ydars ago, with the slaughtering of the last hog, the four biggest meat packers moved away from the stock yards. More than 1,000 smaller packing plants had sprung up around the country and ranchers and farmers increasingly preferred shipping their animals to them thus avoiding the long trip to Chicago.

13,000 Empty Pens The stock yards’ 13,000 empty livestock pens standing on about 350 acres will be replaced by a $3.8 million city-sponsored industrial park that hopefully will bring in 7,000 jobs, replacing those lost by the decline of the yards. It was once “the busiest square mile on earth” to the proud Chicagoan. In 1919 the stock yards and the packing houses they supplied with an endless river of hogs, cattle, and sheep accounted for 17 percent of the nation’s commercial livestock slaughter.

“When I came here,” reminisced one stock yard veteraq, “we used to unload somewhere around 4,000 hogs from a 50-car train and do it every 30 minutes, pushing ‘era into pens assigned to a shipping farmer without losing a single hog.” In the peak year of 1924, the yards housed, fed, and watered 18,653,539 animals. On September 7, 1954, a hereford steer suitably named “Billy the Billionth” was saluted then slaughtered as the billionth animal through the stock