Date: 1927

 

Description: Meatpacking businesses process and ship out meat but there are many other products made from animals that these businesses also handle. This diagram illustrates some of the other by-products we get from cattle that Sioux City meatpackers like Armour & Co. also processed. At the top are products made from hides and hair, including leather goods, plaster bindings, furniture upholstery, hair-stuffed mattresses, and hide glue. Next are products made from fats, muscle sinew and blood, such as blood meal, fertilizer, lubricating oils, glue, gelatin, lard, and tallow, a fat used to make candle wax. Below that are products made from organs and glands, like sausage casings, perfume-bottle caps, drum snares, violin strings, surgical ligatures, and pharmaceuticals. At the bottom are products made from animal bones: hair combs, buttons, crochet needles, dice, chess pieces, oils, and soap grease. Different meatpacking plants could process and create different kinds of products depending on the equipment available. Some of these products could be easily processed within the plant itself, and some of them required more complex manufacturing processes that went through several businesses and plants before arriving at a final product.

 

This illustration comes from a book, By-Products in the Packing Industry, written by Rudolf A. Clemen. Clemen was the assistant director of Armour’s Livestock Bureau, a publishing company connected to Armour & Company, a meatpacking business. Armour was a major meatpacking business with offices in Chicago, Omaha, and Sioux City, and was one of Sioux City’s “Big Three” meatpacking companies.

 

Donor: Mabel Larsen