Porkopolis: The City That Ran on Hogs

Every autumn, the drives began. Farmers across southern Ohio herded their hogs toward Cincinnati, sometimes in groups of a thousand animals, walking them down country roads and city streets to the slaughterhouses along the Mill Creek valley and the riverfront. The hogs ate garbage out of the gutters as they went, which was considered an advantage. A Cincinnati newspaper complained in eighteen forty that the streets were impossible to walk without wading through swine.

By the time the pigs arrived, Cincinnati had the infrastructure to process them faster than anywhere else in the world. The packing season ran from November to March, when the cold kept the meat from spoiling before it could be barreled in salt and shipped downriver to New Orleans. In eighteen sixty, an estimated four hundred fifty thousand hogs were slaughtered in Cincinnati in a single season, by twenty-four hundred men working in more than a dozen packing houses along the creek.

The creek ran red. The smell carried for miles. The nickname Porkopolis was not affectionate when it first appeared around eighteen forty; it was a complaint, and Cincinnati's boosters bristled at it. They came around to embracing it later, after the industry had moved on.

What the hog industry did for Cincinnati was finance everything else. Procter and Gamble used pig fat to make their candles and soap. The river trade that shipped the barrels of salted pork south built the docks and warehouses. And the logic of the Cincinnati slaughterhouse, where each worker performed one task on a carcass moving down a line, was studied by Henry Ford when he was designing his Highland Park assembly plant. He called it a disassembly line and reversed it. The car came together the same way the pig came apart.

Chicago surpassed Cincinnati in meatpacking by the eighteen seventies, as railroads rerouted the trade. Porkopolis became history. But the assembly line remained.