Armour and Company: How Philip Armour Built a Chicago Meatpacking Empire

From a New York Farm to Chicago Packing

Philip Danforth Armour was born in 1832 on a New York farm. He spent time in the California gold fields, then joined a provision firm and a Milwaukee packing company, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on Armour and the packing industry. The success of the Union Stock Yard, which opened in 1865, convinced him that Chicago was the future of meatpacking.

Armour & Co. Opens in 1867

He and his brothers formed Armour & Co. in 1867, packing hogs in a rented plant on the South Branch of the Chicago River. In 1872 he bought land west of the stockyards and built a large pork plant. He moved his family to Chicago in 1875.

Over about 25 years, reinvested profits funded growth beyond pork into dressed beef, meat canning, and by-products such as oleomargarine, glue and fertilizer.

The sequence is worth noting for anyone studying how packers grew. Armour began with hogs in a rented building, bought land next to the stockyards only after the business proved itself, and added each new product line from profits instead of waiting for outside money. The sources reviewed do not give production or sales totals for Armour, so this entry reports none. They also do not say how many workers the Chicago plants employed in any given year, so no headcount appears here either.

A National Business: Kansas City, Omaha and Branches

Armour bought plants in Kansas City and Omaha, opened branch sales offices nationwide and used refrigerated railroad cars to ship chilled fresh beef. In Omaha, Armour's financial backing let Michael and Edward Cudahy take over the Lipton plant in 1887. Armour withdrew in December 1890, and the plant became the Cudahy Packing Company, as recorded in Omaha packing history. Armour's own Omaha plant was completed in 1898.

Labor and Controversy

Like other Chicago packers, Armour opposed trade unions and helped defeat strikes in 1886 and 1894. That record sits beside his philanthropy and is part of any fair account of the company. The sources reviewed do not detail working conditions inside the plants, so this entry makes no claim about them.

Armour's Philanthropy: The Mission and the Institute

Armour founded the Armour Mission in 1886, a nondenominational community center for children, and the Armour Institute in 1893, which offered engineering, architecture and library science to high-school graduates at nominal cost. The institute later became the Illinois Institute of Technology. That lineage means a major Chicago university traces part of its origin to money made in meatpacking. Armour died in January 1901, and his son J. Ogden Armour succeeded him as head of the company.

Absorbing Morris and Later Years

In 1923, Morris and Company, a leading American food company, was merged into Armour and Company, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on the Armour and Morris foreign houses. The Encyclopedia.com history of Swift notes that in 1983 Swift bought the Worthington, Minnesota, plant from Armour's parent, Greyhound, showing that by then Armour was part of a larger corporation.

The seed material for this entry places the company's end in the 1980s, and the exact closure date is not confirmed in the sources reviewed. For ranch and stockyard stories, see the ranching section of farm.FM or a farm.FM story about the stockyards.