According to Paul E.Geib, author of a 1994 Wisconsin Magazineof History article called “Everything But the Squeal: The MilwaukeeStockyards and Meat-Packing Industry, 1840-1930,” when Milwaukee was incorporated in 1846, thebutchering and processing of livestock existed only on a very small scale.Farmers generally raised enough hogs or cattle for their own consumption andfor sale at local markets, and local butchers working out of small shops wouldprocess the livestock. Three of these small-time butchersJohn Plankinton, JohnLayton, and Layton's son Frederickcapitalized on Wisconsin’s agriculturalresources, combining them with the expanding railroad and new refrigerationtechniques to gain command of Milwaukee's meatpacking industry within a fewdecades.
Within a year ofarriving in Milwaukee from Delaware in 1844, Plankinton owned one ofthe largest butcher shops in the country. In 1852 he partnered with FrederickLayton, an English immigrant who owned a meat market with his father on East Water Street.The pair opened a packinghouse on what is now Plankinton Avenue and began to processlarge numbers of cattle and hogs. A few years later, Laytonand Plankinton looked to the low and flat swampland of the Menomonee River Valley to build asprawling complex of slaughterhouses and packinghouses.
According to John Gurda,author of The Making of Milwaukee, Laytonleft the partnership to form his own company in 1863. Plankinton operated onhis own until 1864, when he took on Philip Armour as a junior partner. Theirfirm became one of the nation’s largest meatpackers specializing in pork, andtheir Menomonee Valley facilities covered 14 acres. Muchof the company’s success was attributed to the pair’s superintendent, a youngIrishman named Patrick Cudahy. When Armour left to pursue business interests inChicago in 1885, Plankinton made Cudahy his partner.
At the PlankintonPacking Co., “everything but the squeal,” as Upton Sinclair wrote in The Jungle, was used. Meat was theprincipal product, but packing also produced intestines for sausage casings;blood and bone for fertilizer; fat for lard, bristles for brushes, and feet forglue.
It all added up to avery lucrative business. The meatpacking industry proved to be a boon to theeconomic development of early Milwaukee,and it grew as quickly as the city’s expanding population. According to Gurda,the number of hogs disassembled in Milwaukeeclimbed from 88,853 in 1866 to 225,598 in 1876, and 553,077 in 1886, withPlankinton’s firms generating the most business. Milwaukee was generally the fourth- orfifth-largest meatpacking industry in the country during the 1870s and ’80s.According to figures from the Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, in 1879 meat was,by value of product, the city’s most important industry.
