The Kansas City Stockyards in the West Bottoms west of downtown Kansas City, Missouri flourished from 1871 until closing in 1991. Jay B. Dillingham was the President of the stockyards from 1948 to its closing in 1991.
Contents
The Kansas City Stockyards in the West Bottoms west of downtown Kansas City, Missouri flourished from 1871 until closing in 1991. Jay B. Dillingham was the President of the stockyards from 1948 to its closing in 1991.
The stockyards were built to provide better prices for livestock owners.[ citation needed ] Previously, livestock owners west of Kansas City could only sell at whatever price the railroad offered. With the Kansas City Livestock Exchange and the Stockyards, cattle were sold to the highest bidder.
The stockyards were built around the facilities of the Central Overland California and Pikes Peak Express Company which had outfitted travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and Oregon Trail following the Kansas River. The company went out of business in 1862 following the failure of its Pony Express business from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California.
The stockyards were established in 1871 on the Kansas side of the Kansas River along the Kansas Pacific and Missouri Pacific railroad tracks. In 1878 it expanded from its original 13 acres (53,000 m2) to 55, added loading docks on both the Kansas and Missouri Pacific tracks, new sheds for hogs and sheep, and developed one of the largest horse and mule markets in the country.
According to the Kansas City Kansan : [1] "In the heyday year of 1923, 2,631,808 cattle were received at the Kansas City yards. Of these, 1,194,527 were purchased for use in Kansas City by the packing houses and local markets; the remainder or about 55 percent was shipped out. Of 2,736,174 hogs received, 879,031 were shipped out; of 377,038 calves, 199,084 were shipped out; of 1,165,606 sheep, 445,539 were shipped and of 42,987 horses and mules, all but 1,664 were shipped out."
The stockyards flourished through the 1940s. At its peak only the Union Stock Yards in Chicago was bigger. Business dropped off dramatically after the Great Flood of 1951 which devastated the stockyards and associated businesses and slaughterhouses. After the flood, the stockyards never recovered.
The stockyards straddled the state line across the Kansas river with two thirds of it in Kansas and one third in Missouri. At its peak 16 railroads converged at the yards.
In 1974 the City of Kansas City and the American Royal livestock show tried to reclaim the area by building Kemper Arena on the former stockyards land. The closing of the stockyards ended Kansas City's overt ties to being a cowtown. The stockyard's biggest heritage then became the annual six-week American Royal agricultural show held each October and November nearby at Kemper Arena until 2010. The naming rights to Kemper Arena were sold to Mosaic Life Care in 2016, but the healthcare company gave them back. In May 2018, the developers of Kemper Arena announced that it would be called Hy-Vee Arena. [2] The American Royal livestock show is moving to a new location in Kansas near Kansas Speedway.
The Kansas City metropolitan area is a bi-state metropolitan area anchored by Kansas City, Missouri. Its 14 counties straddle the border between the U.S. states of Missouri and Kansas. With 8,472 square miles (21,940 km2) and a population of more than 2.2 million people, it is the second-largest metropolitan area centered in Missouri and is the largest metropolitan area in Kansas, though Wichita is the largest metropolitan area centered in Kansas. Alongside Kansas City, Missouri, these are the suburbs with populations above 100,000: Overland Park, Kansas; Kansas City, Kansas; Olathe, Kansas; Independence, Missouri; and Lee's Summit, Missouri.
Hy-Vee, Inc. is an employee-owned chain of supermarkets in the Midwestern and Southern United States, with more than 280 locations in Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, South Dakota, Wisconsin, with stores planned in Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Alabama. Hy-Vee was founded in 1930 by Charles Hyde and David Vredenburg in Beaconsfield, Iowa, in a small brick building known as the Beaconsfield Supply Store, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Hy-Vee Arena, previously known as Kemper Arena, is an indoor arena located in Kansas City, Missouri. Prior to conversion to a youth sports and community gymnasium facility, Kemper Arena was previously a 19,500-seat professional sports arena. It has hosted NCAA Final Four basketball games, professional basketball and hockey teams, professional wrestling events, the 1976 Republican National Convention, concerts, and is the ongoing host of the American Royal livestock show.
In railroad terminology, a stock car or cattle car is a type of rolling stock used for carrying livestock to market. A traditional stock car resembles a boxcar with louvered instead of solid car sides for the purpose of providing ventilation; stock cars can be single-level for large animals such as cattle or horses, or they can have two or three levels for smaller animals such as sheep, pigs, and poultry. Specialized types of stock cars have been built to haul live fish and shellfish and circus animals such as camels and elephants. Until the 1880s, when the Mather Stock Car Company and others introduced "more humane" stock cars, death rates could be quite high as the animals were hauled over long distances. Improved technology and faster shipping times have greatly reduced deaths.
The meat-packing industry handles the slaughtering, processing, packaging, and distribution of meat from animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and other livestock. Poultry is generally not included. This greater part of the entire meat industry is primarily focused on producing meat for human consumption, but it also yields a variety of by-products including hides, dried blood, protein meals such as meat & bone meal, and, through the process of rendering, fats.
Gustavus Franklin Swift, Sr. was an American business executive. He founded a meat-packing empire in the Midwest during the late 19th century, over which he presided until his death. He is credited with the development of the first practical ice-cooled railroad car, which allowed his company to ship dressed meats to all parts of the country and abroad, ushering in the "era of cheap beef." Swift pioneered the use of animal by-products for the manufacture of soap, glue, fertilizer, various types of sundries, and even medical products.
The Fort Worth Stockyards is a historic district that is located in Fort Worth, Texas, United States, north of the central business district. A 98-acre (40 ha) portion encompassing much of the district was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Fort Worth Stockyards Historic District in 1976. It holds a former livestock market which operated under various owners from 1866.
The Union Stock Yard & Transit Co., or The Yards, was the meatpacking district in Chicago for more than a century, starting in 1865. The district was operated by a group of railroad companies that acquired marshland and turned it into a centralized processing area. By the 1890s, the railroad capital behind the Union Stockyards was Vanderbilt money. The Union Stockyards operated in the New City community area for 106 years, helping Chicago become known as the "hog butcher for the world," the center of the American meatpacking industry for decades. The yards became inspiration for literature and social reform.
Joseph "Cowboy" McCoy was a 19th-century entrepreneur known for promoting the transport of Longhorn cattle from Texas to the eastern United States.
The history of the Kansas City metropolitan area has significant records since the 19th century, when Frenchmen from St. Louis, Missouri moved up the Missouri River to trap for furs and trade with the Native Americans. This strategic point for commerce and security at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers became the Kansas City metropolitan area, straddling the border between Missouri and Kansas. Kansas City, Missouri was founded in 1838 and surpassed the competing Westport to become the predominant city west of St. Louis. The area had a major role in the westward expansion of the United States. The Santa Fe and Oregon trails ran through the area. In 1854, when Kansas was opened to Euro-American settlement, the Missouri-Kansas border became the first battlefield in the conflict in the American Civil War.
The American Royal is a livestock show, horse show, rodeo, and barbecue competition held each year in September – November at various sites in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area. The Future Farmers of America was founded during the annual Royal. The Kansas City Royals professional baseball team derived its name from the Royal.
The West Bottoms is a historic industrial neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri, immediately west of downtown and straddling the border of Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas. At the confluence of the Missouri River and the Kansas River, it faces Kaw Point, an early campsite of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The region was originally settled by the native tribes, and this spot was permanently settled as French Bottoms in the early 1800s by François Chouteau for his trade with the tribes and early American pioneers. It is one of the oldest areas of the metro along with Westport. Its neighboring Quality Hill neighborhood is a historical center of the pioneer Town of Kansas, which became Kansas City, Missouri.
Cattle drives were a major economic activity in the 19th and early 20th century American West, particularly between 1850s and 1910s. In this period, 27 million cattle were driven from Texas to railheads in Kansas, for shipment to stockyards in St. Louis and points east, and direct to Chicago. The long distances covered, the need for periodic rests by riders and animals, and the establishment of railheads led to the development of "cow towns" across the frontier.
Jay B. Dillingham was a former president of the Kansas City Stockyards as well as former president of the Chamber of Commerce for both Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas.
The Union Stockyards of Omaha, Nebraska, were founded in 1883 in South Omaha by the Union Stock Yards Company of Omaha. A fierce rival of Chicago's Union Stock Yards, the Omaha Union Stockyards were third in the United States for production by 1890. In 1947 they were second to Chicago in the world. Omaha overtook Chicago as the nation's largest livestock market and meat packing industry center in 1955, a title which it held onto until 1971. The 116-year-old institution closed in 1999. The Livestock Exchange Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1999.
National City was a suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois. Incorporated in 1907, it was a company town for the St. Louis National Stockyards Company. In 1996, the company, which owned all residential property in the town, evicted all of its residents. The following year, because it had no residents, National City was dissolved by court order. Its site was subsequently annexed by nearby Fairmont City, Illinois.
A cattle town was a frontier settlement in the Midwestern United States that catered to the cattle industry. The economies of these communities were heavily dependent on the seasonal cattle drives from Texas, which brought the cowboys and the cattle that these towns relied upon. Cattle towns were found at the junctions of railroads and livestock trails. These towns were the destination of the cattle drives, the place where the cattle would be bought and shipped off to urban meatpackers, midwestern cattle feeders, or to ranchers on the central or northern plains. Cattle towns were made famous by popular accounts of rowdy cowboys and outlaws who were kept under control by local lawmen, but those depictions were mostly exaggeration and myth.
The Kansas City Tornadoes were an American professional basketball team based in Kansas City, Missouri, and members of The Basketball League (TBL).
Richard J. Stern was a Kansas City businessman and philanthropist.