ARMOUR AND COMPANY 
To look behind the scenes of an industry which produces 
products that we use every day, and rather take for granted, 
is a very unusual experience for the ordinary consumer. There 
probably is no industry, the products of which we take quite 
so much for granted, as we do those of the packing industry. 
In the beginning, the industry, as exemplified by Armour 
and Company, was planned to handle hogs in a very seasonal 
way. Armour and Company began back in the early sixties 
and it was formed by Philip D. Armour and John Plankinton, 
to provide hams and bacon and other cured pork products 
for the people of the East who were gathering in ever increas- 
ing numbers in the manufacturing centers which then were 
almost exclusively along the Atlantic seaboard. Another fea- 
ture in the business was the provisioning of home seekers and 
of the thousands who were passing from the East to the West, 
hunting gold, or returning from their search to their homes in 
the East. The hogs that were slaughtered for that provision 
business were hogs that were produced in the territory immed- 
lately adjacent to Chicago or Milwaukee, and the slaughtering 
was confined to the late fall and winter months exclusively. 
Cattle slaughter was conducted on a very restricted scale and 
the market was, of course. local. 
There were no store houses of any consequence in which 
might be kept the accumulations that were acquired during 
the slaughtering season. The pork was packed into barrels, 
and the barrels were placed in mountainous piles out on the 
prairie adjacent to the slaughtering house, there to await dis- 
tribution throughout the year. The people of the East had a 
real need for the products of live stock because in them was 
the food so necessary to maintain the vigor and the strength 
of the laborers in manufacturing plants. And the people of 
the West, or Middlewest, had just as real need for such pack- 
ng activities as did the people of the East, because it was in 
that manner that their markets were broadened and the 
people of New York became the principal consumers of the 
products that were raised in surplus quantities in the West.