USA > Kansas > Wyandotte County > History of Wyandotte County, Kansas, and its people, Vol. I > Part 51
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THE LIVE STOCK MARKET.
The live stock market at this point had its beginning forty years ago in a little stoek yards on Kansas soil lying between the Kansas river and the state line, on the south of the Union Pacifie and Missouri Paeifie
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tracks and at the east end of the Kansas river bridges. Prior to that time the city had been the center for the live stock traders and thousands of cattle were annually trailed in and loaded on the ears for shipment to eastern markets. It was inevitable that the live stock industry should be the first to engage the attention of the pioneer invaders of the great prairie country to the west and southwest. It afforded the easiest, and well nigh the only means of gaining a livelihood outside the chase. Cattle of Spanish origin abounded in the far southwest, whenee they had come from old Mexico. Grass, which furnished sustenance for cattle the year round, and put on flesh rapidly in the summer season, covered the prairies of Kansas. Cattle in the far southwest were cheap, and the grass for developing and fattening them was to be had for the taking. The result was that long before the first railroad penetrated this section many thousands of eattle were annually trailed from Texas to Kansas. In fact it was the revenue which the handling of these cattle offered that induced the first railroad to penetrate this cattle grazing territory, and gave to Kansas City its first means of com- minieating with the section from which the bulk of its trade comes today. It is no exaggeration to say that this city owes its present great- ness more to the live stock industry than to all other industries combined.
It was in 1871 that the present Kansas City Stock Yards were founded. A little group of railroad officials and live stock traders. headed by Colonel L. V. Morse, superintendent of the Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad, were the pioneers in the movement. Five acres were fenced off and divided into eleven pens, fifteen unloading chutes were constructed and one small pair of wagon scales was installed. That was thirty-five years ago. The first year's receipts were 120,827 cattle and valves, 41,036 hogs, 4,527 sheep and 809 horses and mules, a total of 6,623 cars. Today the stock yards cover two hundred and seven acres, about two-thirds in Kansas and one-third in Missouri, and the receipts for the year 1909 were 2,341,879 cattle, 308,474 ealves, 3.090,968 hogs, 1.645,702 sheep and 67,811 horses and mules. The value of all live stock shipped to this market in that year (1871) was $4,210,605. The value of the 7,454,834 animals sold, in 1909, was in round numbers one hundred and thirty million dollars.
Not only are the Kansas City Stock Yards the center of the move- ment of the live stock of commerce in the southwest, but they are the center of the pure bred live stock industry for the territory west of the Mississippi. Here is held annually the greatest exhibition of pure bred live stock the world has ever known-the American Royal Live Stock Show, which attracts exhibitors from half the states and terri- tories of the union and visitors from all of them. At the show of 1909 1,500 head of pure bred cattle, horses, swine and goats were on exhibi- tion, and $30,000 in premiums was distributed.
The attendance was nearly 60,000.
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THE MEAT PACKING INDUSTRY.
The meat packing industry was one of the first manufacturing en- terprises to make its appearance. In 1868 Edward W. Patterson, who had the year before established a small slaughter house at Junction City, formed a company with J. W. Slavens of Kansas City and the first packing house, at this point was erected. In one year its record was 4,209 cattle killed. It was the first beef packing in the city, al- though two or three small houses for slaughtering hogs had been operated. In 1869 Mr. Slavens sold his interest to Dr. F. B. Nofsinger. Thomas J. Bigger, formerly of Belfast, Ireland, in 1868, began the pack- ing of hogs for the Irish and English markets the first enterprise of the kind started after the war. In 1869 Mr. Slavens formed a copart- nership under the name Ferguson, Slavens & Company, whose business was afterwards sold to the Morrison Packing Company. These, with the exception of two or three small houses built for local trade, were the pioneers of the great packing industry.
In 1870 Plankington & Armour rented the packing house of Patter- son & Nofsinger, but in the following year they started a plant of their own at the state line in Kansas, and thus laid the foundation of a pack- ing plant which now is the largest of its kind in the world. The firm had already two large houses, one in Milwaukee and one in Chicago. From the date of the establishment of their business at this point the steady and rapid progress of the great interest represented began. In 1884 John Plankington retired from the firm and the corporation of Armour Brothers Packing Company was formed. The brothers repre- sented in the packing firm were Simeon B. Armour. Alexander W. Armour and Philip D. Armonr. Later the plant was placed under the corporation known as the Armour Packing Company and thus it was continued until in the autumn of 1910, when the corporation name was discontinued and the Armour packing plants at Kansas City, Kan- sas, Chicago, Omaha, St. Louis, Ft. Worth and Milwaukee, as well as their several hundred branches, passed under the general control of Armour & Company.
The Fowler Brothers, with packing houses in Liverpool, New York and Chicago, began a beef and pork plant and lard refinery at Kansas City, Kansas, in 1881; Swift & Company began operation there in 1888 and Kingan & Company, in the same year, built a great plant on the site of the present Cudahy Packing Company's establishment on the bank of the Kansas river at Kansas avenue. Afterwards this was destroyed by fire, the site and ruins were purchased by the Cudahy Packing Company and the present great plant ereeted. Schwarzs- child & Sulzberger of New York, in 1892 purchased the old packing plant at Adams street and Osage avenue, in Kansas City, Kansas. It was originally built in the early eighties by the Western Dressed Beef Com-
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pany, as a part of the great scheme of the Marquis de Mores to have his corporation produce cattle on its own ranches, slaughter them at this point and in its own packing houses and sell the products in its own wholesale houses in New York, Baltimore, Boston, London and Paris. The plan failed. The plant was operated for a time by Morris, Butt & Miller. Then it was sold to the Schwarzschild & Sulzberger Com- pany, now the Sulzberger & Sons Company. Nelson Morris in 1903 erected a model packing plant on the Kansas river which is now being operated under the corporation name of Morris & Company. About the same time the National Packing Company, organized by the "Big Four" packers, purchased the old Ruddy packing plant in Armourdale, also the Fowler plant, and proceeded to operate them as independent concerns. Then came the American Dressed Beef and Provision Com- pany about 1904. The St. Joe Packing Company, Cochrane & Son, J. C. Bertram and the Holmes Packing Company, operate small houses in Kansas City, Kansas.
There was no laek of cattle for a basis of beef packing. It is esti- mated that at the close of the Civil war there were in Texas literally millions of cattle for which there was practically no market. The only way to reach Chicago, at that time the principal northern center was to drive the herds through Kansas and into Missouri to some rail- road terminus.
The opening of this great eattle raising region by the railroads soon made Kansas City an important shipping point. It is already the second hog and cattle market of the great west, and has already out- stripped St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and all the rest except Chicago. The reason assigned for the development of the market so rapidly was the competition of the southwestern railways that entered Kansas City.
This was the situation at the time of the perfection of the refrigera- tor car system, which has made it possible to ship fresh meats to all parts of the world, and as soon as the cars were proven to be practicable the Chicago, New York and Boston packers began to look about for a western location for their houses. It was about this time that the citi- zens of Omaha, Nebraska, succeeded in interesting some outsiders in - the establishment of a cattle market and packing center in that place, and in 1884 a stockyards company was organized with a million dollar capital which controlled, so it is reported, an investment of some fifteen millions of dollars in American cattle and grazing lands. Then, in 1885, G. H. Hammond & Company, a Michigan corporation, began the erection of a packing plant at Omaha, followed in the next year by another that the stock yards company was erecting under contract for the Fowlers, who had already built packing houses at Atchison and Kansas City, Kansas. Then, in 1886, Sir Thomas J. Lipton, the well known English pork packer, built a plant in Omaha, which, in the fol-
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lowing season, he sold to P. D. Armour, of Chicago, and Michael Cudahy, of Milwaukee. In 1890 Armour sold his Omaha interests, devoting his time to larger interests at Kansas City. Although the eastern packers were hardly established in Kansas City by 1890. the census for that year shows six parking houses representing nearly nine millions of dollars and handling nearly forty million dollars' worth of finished products. In that year only about one-third of the cattle that came to the Kansas City stockyards were sold to the paekers, the rest being re-shipped to Chicago and St. Louis. By 1895, however, the Kansas City packing houses were consuming about half the million and a half head of cattle that the stockyards received annually, and by the time of the twelfth census nearly two-thirds of the cattle that came to Kan- sas City were slaughtered there, while very few hogs were shipped out of it.
The amount of capital invested in the packing houses had increased nearly seventy per cent in the decade, and represented about fifteen millions of dollars, while the number of packing houses had inereased from six to eight. The value of the packing-house products in 1900 was more than seventy-three millions of dollars, or more than the com- bined value of all the manufactured products of both Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri, for the year of 1890. The ten
years from 1900 to 1910 showed an enormous growth of the business. The number of establishments were inereased from eight to fourteen according to the United States census. The amount of capital invested was then $32,667,000 and the total value of the output for 1909 was $148.459,000, while 10,650 employees were on the payrolls, receiving in wages for the year amounting to $6,693,269, or an average of $557 for each employe.
This great centralization that has been accomplished in Kansas City has practically been the result of twenty years' work, for before 1890 the industry was comparatively small. It is the consequence of conditions partly peculiar to the industry itself, but in part the result of conditions which led to the growth of other lines of manufactures in Kansas City in the same period. It is but just to give to the rapid growth of the packing industry part of the credit for the attraetion of other activities, for prosperity in any line, whatever its eanse, cannot but attract others. At any event, before the census of 1890 the activity of the two Kansas Citys was beginning to be noticeable in mann- facturing, and in the census year they had some seventeen hundred establishments. producing about seventy-six million dollars of finished products. Kansas City, Kansas, at that time had little else in a manufacturing way than its packing houses, the produet of its other industries aggregating only about four million dollars annually. Until 1886, on the Kansas side of the line, was, however, a group of independ- ent towns, with no combined strength such as the union into one muniei-
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pality, in 1886, was the means of enacting. Since that time it has quadrupled in population, has added to its list of industries, mills and elevators, foundries and machine shops; has multiplied its packing houses, until now it produces more manufactured artieles than any other city in the United States according to population, and practically double the amount of the Missouri side of the town.
The meat packing companies operating plants in Kansas City, Kansas, at this writing are as follows:
Armour & Company.
American Dressed Beef and Provision Company.
Baum-Adler Company.
Swift & Company.
Morris & Company.
Sulzberger & Sons Company.
The Cudahy Packing Company.
The Fowler Packing Company (National Packing Company).
Ruddy Bros. (National Paeking Company).
Ilolmes Packing Company.
August Fruend. Cochrane & Son.
J. C. Bertram. St. Joe Packing Company.
THE GREAT SOAP MANUFACTORIES.
Contemporaneous with the growth and importance of the live stock market and the meat packing industry is the development of large soap manufacturing plants in Kansas City, Kansas. Two of these plants are among the largest institutions of their kind in the world. The oldest of these is the Peet Brothers Manufacturing Company. organized some twenty years ago. A large plant in the Armourdale district, at Adams street and Osage avenue, built up by degrees until it represented an investment of one half million dollars, was destroyed by fire in 1910. The company lost no time in building a new and mneh larger plant at Seventeenth street and Kansas avenue, which now is complete and in operation. The company now has a paid-in capital stock of $375,000.
The Proctor & Gamble Company, of Cincinnati, purchased ground in the Kansas river valley west of Armourdale in 1903, and during the next year its large one million dollar plant was placed in operation. The company has a capital of $750,000. Now the plans are ready for an addition to the plant of a building one hundred by four hundred feet and four stories high. The corporation employs two hundred and fifty persons and has an annual output of about $3,000,000.
These two, with the Kansas City Soap Company, are supplying an
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output of soap equal to one-fourth of the amount manufactured in the United States.
The Standard Rendering Company, manufacturing lubricating oils and other rendering products, has a capital of $1,000,000 and operates a large plant in the stock-yards distriet.
COOPERAGE AND BOX FACTORIES.
The live stock and packing industry has brought numerous other establishments which are located along the Kansas river valley in Kansas City, Kansas. Among them are several large cooperage and hox factories. The Hauber Cooperage Company, with a capital of $29,000, gives employment to a force of twenty-five to fifty men. John R. Kelley, operating a large cooperage plant in the city, has a capital of $125,000, employes between fifty and one hundred coopers and has an annual output of $125,000 to $150,000.
The Kansas City Packing Box Company has a large plant operated on a capital of $100,000, employing 236 persons and an annual output, in 1910, of $575,000.
The Creamery Package Manufacturing Company and the N. A. Kennedy Supply Company are manufacturers of butter tubs, cach employing thirty-five men.
The Koch Butchers Supply Company, with a capital of $40,000, is an extensive manufacturer of butchers furniture.
The Kansas City Box and Basket Manufacturing Company is a large producer of berry boxes and baskets, and crates for fruits and vegetables. It has forty-five employes and $18,000 capital invested.
THE RAILROAD SHOPS.
In addition to the large shops of the Union Pacific, Santa Fe, Missouri Pacific and Rock Island at Kansas City, Kansas, is the exten- sive plant of the L. J. Smith Company on Central avenue. The plant was formerly the Riverside Iron Works, but was purchased in 1910 by the L. J. Smith Company, builders of railroads, for locomotive repairs. It is one of the largest concerns of its kind in the central west and car- ries a large force of employes.
The Griffin Wheel Company, with $50,000 capital, operates a large plant in Kansas City, Kansas, for the manufacture of car wheels, em- ploying one hundred and fifty mechanics.
FOUNDRIES AND MACHINE SHOPS.
Among the institutions that for years have contributed to the up- building of Kansas City, Kansas, as an important industrial center, are Vol. I-31
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several large foundries and machine shops. One of the oldest of these is the Armourdale Foundry, located at Kansas avenue and Adams street, which has been in operation for twenty-five years. Iron castings are moulded there and twenty-six skilled men are employed.
The Kansas City Foundry Company's plant employs eleven mould- ers. Others are the West Side Foundry, the West Side Machine Works, The Kaw Boiler Works and the Missouri Boiler Works.
IMPLEMENT FACTORIES.
The Eagle Manufacturing Company of Kansas City, Kansas, is one of the largest manufacturers of agricultural implements at this point. It has a capital of $200,000 and give employment to fifty mechanics.
The Western Wheelbarrow Manufacturing Company employs thir- ty-six men in its wheelbarrow and truck plant. It has a capital of $75,000.
The II. N. Strait Manufacturing Company, with a capital of $200,000, has one of the oldest and largest concerns in Kansas City, Kansas. The company manufactures engines, hay presses and scales, employing one hundred and sixty men.
The Western Steel and Wire Company also manufactures hay presses. It has a capital of $15,000.
The Hume Manufacturing Company is a manufacturer of machinery.
A. B. Clippinger and Son employ twenty-five mechanies in their Kansas City, Kansas, plant.
The Viking Refrigerator Company's output of refrigerators in 1910 was $45,000. The company has $25,000 capital.
THE COTTON INDUSTRY.
When, on the 21st day of February, 1907, the first loom was placed m operation in the Kansas City Cotton Mills, at Eighteenth street and Kansas avenue in Kansas City, Kansas, there entered the tip end of the wedge which is to open in this section an industry of great proportions. Many were the predictions that the mills would not be completed, due to the unreasoning belief that cotton textiles could not snecessfully be manufactured without the English fogs. The New Englanders were also sanguine in the belief that the New England fogs were indis- pensable to the manufacture of cotton in this country. All of this has been exploded, however, by the successful operation of mills in the south, and with modern machinery and intelligent handling it has been demonstrated that here in the central west is a great field for the cotton industry. With the local, southwestern, western and north-
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western markets accessible, even with an unprecedented development of the textile industry in the central west, it will be some years before Kansas need concern themselves seriously about foreign markets for cotton goods. With trunk railway lines reaching directly twenty-four large wholesale dry-goods markets, without going east of Chicago, St. Louis, Memphis or New Orleans, Kansas City possesses unequalled shipping facilities for marketing the product of textile mills. In the natural order, cotton should be manufactured in the central west and the product passed on direct to the northeastern states and across the Atlantic.
The Kansas City Cotton Mills, representing an investment of more than 500,000, were largely the result of the energy of the late Witten McDonald. The first operation of the mills started with 10,000 spindles employing about two hundred persons. The manufacture was confined chiefly to white cotton ducking and the coarser fabries, but experience demonstrated that the finer cotton fabrics could be snecessfully mann- factured. The death of Mr. McDonald, in 1909, caused an interruption to the operation of the mills. Early in 1911 a reorganization was effected by which the manufactory was purchased by a new company connected with the cotton industry of the south and east. The pur- pose is to enlarge the eapacity to 100,000 spindles and eventually in- crease the force of employes to 1,700.
MANUFACTURE OF COTTON PRODUCTS.
Along with the cotton textile mills has come a large mill in Kansas City, Kansas, for the manufacture of cotton seed oil and other edible cotton products, as well as cotton seed meal cake. The mill, located near the Kansas City Cotton Mills, is now operated by Frank G. Kinney & Company of Birmingham, Alabama, which firm has several large mills in the south. The company began operating in Kansas City, Kansas, early in 1911, and is making this the principal distributing point for these products in the territory west of the Great Lakes.
THE CEMENT INDUSTRY.
The diseovery, in 1897, of deposits of shale and cement rock in the hills north of the Kansas river, one mile east of the city of Bonner Springs, led to the building of the Bonner Brand Portland Cement Company's great mills. They are among the largest, best equipped and most distinctively modern plants in the United States. The deposits were such as are seldom found, not only as to their value in the manu- facture of a superior quality of cement fit for all the manifold uses to which it is put, but also for the fact that the quantity is considered by experts as sufficient to keep the mills running at full capacity for one
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hundred years. The faet of these mills being almost in sight and sound of this great city in which hundreds of thousands of barrels of cement annually are used or distributed, with the Santa Fe, Union Pacific and Rock Island railroads and the Kansas river making cheap transporta- tion sure, was another incentive to the building of this great plant and the making of Kansas City an important manufacturing and distribut- ing point for this very necessary commodity.
A number of wells were already produeing gas near Bonner Springs and the Cement Company, on entering the field, immediately began sinking other wells, which are today producing sufficient gas to furnish fuel and light in Bonner Springs, to run what is known as the Gray Briek plant and to furnish the fuel for the operation of the cement plant. This gas is of sufficient pressure to more than supply the before men- tioned consumers and the fuel needs of the cement mill.
In the manufacturing of cement, under this system, every improve- ment known to mechanical science is used, even the force of gravity being harnessed to bring the raw material from the shale beds on the hillside. Gravity-force alone is employed, no hoisting or drawing being necessary. This not only lessens the labor and cost of mainte- nance, but also decreases the operating expenses. In the crushing and other departments nothing but giant machinery is used. The kilns are all rotary, the kind introduced in the western cement manufacturing districts with great success.
The Bonner Springs plant originally was built with a capacity for manufacturing 2,500 barrels of cement daily. employing a large force of men. The company's capital stock is owned almost entirely by Kansas men, and the original corporation was organized in 1907 by W. II. McCaffrey. The plant was finished at the time of the financial depression, and its successful operation at first was impaired. But even at that time, when the old company's affairs were put in the hands of Henry MeGrew as receiver pending a re-organization, the plant was operated at a profit of from $8,000 to $9,000 a month, and under the re-organized company, composed of Kansas men who built the plant with their own money, it has been highly profitable.
AN OIL DISTRIBUTING CENTER.
The proximity of Kansas City, Kansas, to the great oil fields of Kansas and Oklahoma has made Kansas City, Kansas, an important oil center. Not only are large quantities of refined oils and the by-products of refineries sold and distributed there, but the city is made the base of supply for many million gallons of fuel oils which contribute largely to manufacture, as well as to use in the furnaces of many buildings for power and heating.
The Kansas City Oil Company, capital $1,000,000 has its refinery at
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Second street and Troup avenue. It employs forty-eight men and has an annual output of $200,000.
The Great Western Oil and Refinery Company, owning many oil wells in southern Kansas and Oklahoma, in 1911 established a large house in Kansas City, Kansas, for the distribution of its products.
The Uncle Sam Oil Company began, in 1909, the erection of a refinery at Eighteenth street and Osage avenue, and the laving of a pipe line from the oil fields to Kansas City, Kansas. The plant is not in full operation, although the company is handling large quantities of oil for the local trade.
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