Chicago - Meat Packing Industry - Swift & Co.'s Packing House: knocking cattle before slaughtering – Historic Print
(Originally scanned by the Library of Congress. Each image is professionally and digitally cleaned of artifacts such as color bars and extra borders prior to printing.)
Description
A window into the past: Chicago - Meat Packing Industry - Swift & Co.'s Packing House: knocking cattle before slaughtering, preserved in this historic photograph. An authentic image from the Library of Congress, it carries the weight of the real historical record.
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Chicago - Meat Packing Industry - Swift & Co.'s Packing House: knocking cattle before slaughtering
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Few images capture the start of the Chicago stockyard process as directly as this stereograph, which shows cattle being knocked (stunned) before slaughter at Swift & Co.'s packing house. Stereo cards like this one were mass-produced for parlor viewers, and this example, copyrighted by the H.C. White Co., reflects how the meatpacking district was presented to the American public around 1906. That was the period when Upton Sinclair's exposé "The Jungle" drew national attention to conditions in these plants, so the scene carries more weight than a simple industrial view. Note the tight, orderly arrangement of animals and workers, which reflects the assembly-line methods Chicago packers had made famous.
| Created / published | c1906. |
|---|---|
| Medium | 1 photographic print on stereo card : stereograph. |
| Notes | H73962 U.S. Copyright Office. Stereo copyrighted by H.C. White Co. This record contains unverified, old data from caption card, with subsequent revisions. Caption card tracings: Meat processing; Shelf. |
| Source | Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division |
| Original scan | 1,385 × 1,536 px · prints to 5 × 5 in at 300 dpi |
| Reference | AMZ-SOTP-HPA-128067 |
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