National Stock Yards

Overview

The St. Louis National Stockyards operated across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri, on a site that became its own incorporated municipality: National City, Illinois, near East St. Louis. The St. Louis National Stock Yards Company was incorporated on November 4, 1872, and the yards opened just over a year later, on November 19, 1873, on roughly 656 acres of former farmland known locally as Gallagher Pastures. Eastern investors financed the operation with roughly $1.5 million, a substantial commitment that signaled how seriously outside capital took the site's potential as a Mississippi River counterpart to Chicago's Union Stock Yards.

For more than a century afterward, the National Stock Yards ranked among the largest livestock markets in the country, built around roughly 100 acres of pens capable of holding about 15,000 cattle, 10,000 sheep, and 20,000 hogs simultaneously — enough capacity to process the output of a substantial swath of the Midwest's livestock producers on any given day. Like Chicago's Union Stock Yards and Fort Worth's, the National Stock Yards functioned as a terminal market: a central yard where livestock arrived by rail to be sorted, weighed, and sold to packing firms, rather than a place where any single farmer or rancher dealt directly with a buyer far from home. What set the National Stock Yards apart from those peers was not the market itself but the settlement that grew up entirely to serve it.

A Company Town Built on Hogs

What made the National Stock Yards unusual, even among America's major livestock markets, was the town built around it. In 1907, the surrounding settlement incorporated as National City, Illinois — and unlike an ordinary municipality, National City was, in effect, wholly owned by the stockyards company. The company held title to essentially every parcel in town: roughly 40 houses, a church and school, and the police and fire services that kept the place running all belonged to, or were controlled by, the same corporate entity that ran the yards. In most American company towns of the era, a mill or a mine or a mill town's central employer owned the housing and often the shops; National City took that logic further, since its founding industry was not a single factory but an entire livestock market, and the town's fortunes rose and fell with commodity volumes rather than with the output of one plant.

That arrangement was not merely a curiosity. Owning the town let the company avoid certain local taxes and regulatory pressures that an independent municipal government might have imposed, giving it a degree of control over its own operating environment that few American industrial employers of the era enjoyed. Major packing firms — Swift, Armour, and Hunter among them — built plants on company land, drawing on the same rail infrastructure and pen capacity that made the site attractive in the first place. At the market's peak, in 1947, roughly 1.86 million cattle passed through the yards in a single year, a scale that placed National City among the handful of truly major American livestock markets, even though most people outside the livestock trade had never heard its name. That obscurity was itself telling: unlike Chicago or Fort Worth, National City had almost no civic identity apart from the yards it served, no downtown or public square built for any purpose other than moving livestock through its pens.

The Hog Capital of the Nation

By the mid-20th century, the National Stock Yards had built a reputation specifically around hogs rather than cattle, and around 1954 it was widely cited as having surpassed both Chicago and Omaha to become the largest hog market in the world — a claim that earned it the nickname Hog Capital of the Nation. The title marked a real shift in the geography of American meatpacking: Chicago's Union Stock Yards were already fading by the 1950s, and National City's rise reflected how thoroughly the industry's center of gravity had moved toward the Mississippi Valley and closer to the Corn Belt farms that supplied hog producers.

For a company town whose entire existence depended on livestock volume, that title was not just a boast — it was the clearest possible evidence that the arrangement between company and town was still paying off. A town built to serve a market, rather than a market that happened to sit near a town, had reached the top of the industry it existed to serve, and for a brief period in the 1950s that made National City, by one significant measure, more consequential to American hog production than either of its larger, better-known rivals.

Decline & Dissolution

The forces that eventually unwound the National Stock Yards were the same ones that ended most of America's great terminal markets. The Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 had already begun subjecting stockyard companies to federal regulation they had previously avoided, chipping away at the advantages a company-owned town like National City had been built to protect. After World War II, the shift from rail to truck transport accelerated the decline further: by 1952, roughly 99 percent of hogs arrived by truck rather than by rail, undermining the entire rail-centered logic on which the yards, and the town, had been built. Rising labor costs and the broader decentralization of meatpacking toward smaller regional plants did the rest.

The plant closures came in a slow, grinding sequence rather than a single collapse. Armour closed its National City plant in 1959, Hunter followed in 1980, Royal closed in 1981, and Swift Independent shut down in 1986 — nearly three decades between the first major closure and the last, a slow unwinding rather than a sudden collapse, but one that steadily hollowed out both the market and the town built to serve it. By the mid-1990s, the town that had once housed workers for one of the country's largest stockyards was nearly empty; its last roughly 50 residents were evicted in 1996, and livestock auctions ceased entirely in 1997. National City itself, the company town incorporated in 1907, was legally dissolved in 1997 and its territory annexed by neighboring Fairmont City in 1999 — an unusually clean bureaucratic end for a place that had never quite functioned like an ordinary town to begin with, since the company that owned it effectively wound down the town's affairs along with its own.

The Site Today

Almost nothing remains of the National Stock Yards' working infrastructure. Most of its pens, barns, and packing structures were demolished after the market closed, and the land has been given over largely to industrial use. The Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, opened in 2014, now crosses the Mississippi through part of the former yards' footprint, and the nearby World Wide Technology Raceway occupies land not far from where cattle and hogs once arrived by the tens of thousands.

What survives is mostly documentary and reputational: a place that briefly outdid Chicago and Omaha as the world's largest hog market, and a company town so completely owned by its founding corporation that livestock in its pens vastly outnumbered the people who lived and worked among them. Where Fort Worth's Stockyards found a second life as a heritage-tourism district and Chicago's Union Stock Yards left behind a landmark gate, the National Stock Yards and National City largely disappeared together, company and town dissolving into the same industrial landscape that had once made them, briefly, the hog capital of the nation.

Frequently Asked Questions