The Sioux City Stockyards and the Swift Explosion

Sioux City once ran on blood and livestock. The stockyards opened in eighteen eighty-four on the Missouri River bottomland, and by their peak year of nineteen twenty-four they processed three million seven hundred thousand hogs in a single year, fifty percent more than Iowa's entire human population at the time. Swift and Company, Armour, and Cudahy formed a meatpacking triangle that employed thousands.

The Swift plant you are near was built in nineteen eighteen and nineteen as a speculative venture, then taken over by Swift in nineteen twenty-four. On December fourteenth, nineteen forty-nine, an explosion ripped through the facility, killing twenty-one workers and injuring ninety. The plant kept running until nineteen seventy-four, then spent years as a mall before the last major building came down in twenty-ten.

The industry that built Sioux City is gone, but the stockyards district shaped the city's geography, labor culture, and immigrant communities for a full century.