Armour & Co.
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Armour & Co., a meatpacking business, was established as Plankinton, Armour & Co. by John Plankinton (1820–1891) and Philip Danforth Armour (1832–1901) in 1863. Initially based in Milwaukee, the company saw tremendous growth during the American Civil War and went on to open branches in Chicago and Kansas City. Philip Armour relocated to Chicago in 1875 to manage the company’s office there, and Plankinton left the business in 1884. The Armour family assumed full responsibility for the company thereafter, with Jonathan Ogden Armour, Philip’s son, assuming leadership in 1901.
Armour & Co. became one of the largest meatpacking businesses in the United States and, along with similar companies founded by George Hammond and Gustavus Swift, helped secure Chicago’s reputation as what poet Carl Sandberg called the “Hog Butcher for the World.” Packinghouses situated on the banks of the Chicago River and major railway expansions such as the development of the Union Stockyards in 1860 allowed for the easy importation of surplus livestock from midwestern farms into Chicago and the subsequent distribution of processed meats to consumers around the country. Twelve million cows and pigs passed through the Union Stockyards in 1890 alone.
Historically, the production calendar of the meatpacking industry was dictated by the seasons, with meat processing and transportation occurring primarily in the cold, winter months to avoid spoilage. Technological advances in refrigeration enabled unprecedented year-round operations, and ice-chilled railcars allowed for the shipment of raw, dressed meats over long distances. Armour & Co. gained a competitive edge because it streamlined the meatpacking process, innovating steam hoists used to lift and move cow and pig carcasses and envisioning new purposes for meatpacking byproducts. The company worked with scientists to develop industrial and consumer goods from the non-comestible parts of the animals it processed. Bones and hides were either sold or used to make gelatin, leather goods, hair and paint brushes, candles and soaps, glue, fertilizer, glycerin, an inexpensive alternative to butter called oleomargarine, and ammonia. Armour envisioned the packing house of the future as a site that might eventually “include a tannery, a boot and show factory, a cloth mill and a mammoth tailor shop.”
Efficiency was key to Armour & Co.’s success, as was its reliance on the underpaid, unregulated labor of immigrant communities in Chicago. Armour & Co. and other Chicago packing houses were the sites of significant labor organization at the turn of the century. Workers organized strikes in support of an eight-hour workday and wage increases, and the social reformer Jane Addams met with J. Ogden Armour in 1904 to advocate for the city’s packinghouse laborers. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906), which was based on interviews with laborers, representatives from Chicago’s settlement houses, and health inspectors, as well as his firsthand observations of slaughterhouses around the Union Stockyards, presented a damning view of the harsh working conditions and lack of sanitation standards in the industry. The book resulted in the passage of the Meat Inspection Act in 1906, which imposed new regulations and quality controls on meat packers.
Armour & Co. accumulated great wealth as a result of the company’s business practices, and the Armour family supported many philanthropic causes in the city. Inspired by the sermons of Reverend Frank Wakely Gunsaulas, a minister at the Plymouth Congregational Church on the South Side, Philip D. Armour Sr. established the Armour Institute in 1886. The school offered vocational training for members of the working class with the goal of developing a skilled workforce that would propel industrial expansion. The school eventually merged with Lewis Institute, a trade school serving immigrant populations, to become the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) in 1940. German architect Mies van der Rohe was recruited to head the architecture department of the Armour Institute two years before the merger of the two schools. Along with Ludwig Hilberseimer and Walter Peterhans, colleagues from the German Bauhaus, Mies introduced a modernist design curriculum with a focus on drawing, construction methods, and the careful study of materials. Mies conceived of a comprehensive master plan for the Armour Institute and designed many of the buildings on its campus located in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In 1949, the Institute of Design, the design school founded by László Moholy-Nagy, another Bauhaus émigré, merged with IIT. Beyond its industrial innovations, Armour & Co. helped lay the foundation for an important chapter in Chicago’s design history as a supporter of what would become one of the city’s most storied architecture and design schools.Source
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