Everybody knows where meat comes from – the grocery store – right?.

Modern consumers can buy a wide variety of pack-aged meats, ranging from your standard hamburger to newer items such as skinless chicken breasts and even frozen portions of Chicken Kiev – provided they’ve been saving up these days.

Back in the 1800s, the selection – not to mention the quality – of the meats consumers could buy was a lot slimmer. But the constant has always been that meat has offered farmers an easier, more compact way to get their grain to market.

In Kendall County, the earliest farmers grew livestock as well as grain. Chickens, pigs, cattle, sheep and a variety of other animals were grown on the small diversified and subsistence farms of the 19th century.

Early in the area’s history, farmers found markets for both livestock and grain in the towns that grew up along the county’s main roads and along the Fox River.

The inns that offered lodging and stagecoach team changing stations along the county’s earliest roads – the trails from Chicago to Ottawa to the southwest and Galena to the northwest – needed food for their customers, both human and equine.

The inns around which pioneer farms were located, therefore, became some of the earliest markets for farm produce. Plattville, Yorkville, Lisbon, and Oswego all boasted stagecoach inns, and became early farm produce markets as well.

As more and more farmers began settling on Kendall County’s prairies, the area’s small villages couldn’t absorb all the area’s farm production. So excess grain and meat was either taken overland to Ottawa or Chicago.

Both Kendall’s towns and farmers benefited from the extension of the Chicago Burlington & Quincy Railroad through the county in 1853 and its Fox River Branch in 1870. Using the CB&Q’s main line, livestock could be shipped directly to the growing Chicago market. And with the construction of the Fox River Branch line up the east side of the Fox River, more farms were within easy reach of a railhead.

Yorkville had stockyards on both sides of the Fox River where cattle and hogs were herded from the country by the 1870s. Oswego, too, boasted a stockyard be-tween the railroad tracks and the Fox River, with a loading chute along the tracks east of North Adams Street.

Holding pens were located between North Adams and the river. There were also two slaughterhouses along the Fox River, one near Waubonsie Creek’s mouth and the other off South Adams Street.

But even after the construction of the rail lines, some area farmers continued to drive livestock directly to the Chicago market to avoid shipping charges.

After the end of the Civil War, a joint venture of Chicago’s major railroads and the Chicago Pork Packers Association built the Chicago Union Stockyards on the city’s south side. The yards were laid out by the chief engineer of the Chicago & Alton Railroad on a 160-acre site west of Halsted Street.

The Chicago yards were a marvel of their time, and within a few years were able to handle 21,000 head of cattle, 75,000 hogs, 21,000 sheep, and 200 horses in 2,300 pens built on 60 acres.

The yards also featured the six-story Hough House hotel and the Exchange Building where livestock deals were made.

When modern meat packing techniques were developed in Cincinnati, Chicago businessmen quickly brought them to Chicago and perfected them. Within a few years, Chicago was not only the main livestock market in the U.S., but it also was the nation’s largest meat packing center.

All of this activity was partly fueled by farmers living in Chicago’s hinterland – including Kendall County. Local farmers drove herds of livestock into Chicago or sent them there by rail and often personally dealt with the men who would one day become the kings of the nation’s meat packing business, including Philip Armour and Gustavus Swift.

In 1986, Yorkville’s Gerald Matlock recalled of his great-grandfather: “Great-grandfather’s first name was West, and Mr. Armour’s first name was Philip. They greeted one another as West or Phil. When their business was finished, the horses were stabled in a large barn where they would be fed and cared for, for 50 cents a day if Armour furnished the feed and for 25 cents if you brought your own feed…One winter, they had a butcher-ing bee at [the Matlock farm] which they killed and dressed 83 hogs. These were hung in trees to freeze, in preparation for the trip to Chicago on bobsleds.”

Although overland droves continued, by the late 1870s, most of the livestock heading for Chicago was going by train, which turned out helping the small village of Montgomery.

The CB&Q owned a huge mined-out gravel pit on the west side of the river at Montgomery, the land available for other purposes. Coincidentally, an 1879 law mandated that livestock transported across state lines by rail had to be fed and watered at least every 24 hours. So, to take care of the growing volume of various kinds of livestock shipped over its mainline, the CB&Q built a huge sheep yard at conveniently located Montgomery in 1892.

As the Kendall County Record reported: “The pens and yards will cover 15 or 20 acres and will be built in the old gravel pit just north of the village. … Sheep that are shipped over the Chicago Burlington & Quincy and the Chicago Burlington & Northern lines will be unloaded at Montgomery and there prepared for the market. They will then be shipped to Chicago in car load lots or several cars at a time as wanted.”

The yards, just like Chicago’s, featured their own hotel where stockmen stayed while waiting for their livestock to take their final journey into Chicago. Eventually, the Montgomery yards became the largest sheep transport facility of its kind in the world.

Today, the nation’s interstate highway system and the trucks that travel it have made both cattle drives and the old system of stockyards obsolete. The Yorkville and Oswego stockyards are long gone – only dim memories of them remain for even the oldest area residents.

The sprawling Montgomery yards have also vanished, and the Chicago yards themselves also have disappeared into the history books. The end of the old system marked the end of a way of life that fueled the Midwest’s prosperity for almost 100 years.

Interested in more local history? Visit http://historyonthefox.wordpress.com/