Morris & Company: Nelson Morris and One of the Original Stockyards Packers

A German Immigrant in Chicago

Nelson Morris was born in 1839 in Hechingen, Germany, and his family emigrated to America in 1851. He moved to Chicago in 1854 and worked for the meatpacker John B. Sherman, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago entry on the Armour and Morris foreign houses. In 1859, he began packing under his own name, the start of what became Nelson Morris & Company. A Wikipedia biography of Nelson Morris gives a broader outline of his life.

Union Stock Yard and the Civil War

His company was one of the original packers at the Union Stock Yard when it opened in 1865. During the Civil War, Morris supplied beef to Union armies. Annual sales were about $11 million by 1873, according to the Saddle and Sirloin Portrait Foundation biography, and they reached about $100 million by his death in 1907.

Shipping Dressed Beef Across the Atlantic

Morris pioneered shipping dressed beef from Chicago to the East Coast and Europe. A 1893 trade card said the company could process 10,000 animals per day. By the early 1890s the Fairbank Canning Company, which Morris owned, slaughtered over 500,000 cattle a year. The company had plants in East St. Louis and Kansas City.

Scale was a selling point as well as a fact. Morris sold beef to Union armies in wartime, later shipped dressed beef to the East Coast and Europe, and by 1900 ran nearly 100 branches. Those are the documented markers of a firm that sold well beyond its home market.

The trade card figure is a company claim and should be read as a statement of capacity, not a measured output.

Ranches, Branches and Breeding

Morris also owned cattle ranches in Texas and the Dakotas and was an early importer of Polled Angus cattle for them. By 1900, the company had nearly 100 branches across the United States and employed over 3,700 people at the Union Stock Yard.

Philanthropy and Death

Morris's chief charitable interest was medical research, according to the Saddle and Sirloin biography. He died in 1907. The company he built remained a leading American food company at the end of the 1910s, according to the Encyclopedia of Chicago.

That is the extent of the documented record in the sources reviewed. They do not describe Morris's family life, his management methods or labor relations in detail, so this entry stays with the facts about the business: its start in 1859, its place among the original stockyard packers, its growth in sales and branches, and its merger into Armour.

The 1923 Merger and What Followed

Morris and Company was merged into Armour and Company in 1923. The reasons for the merger are not detailed in the sources reviewed, so this entry makes no claim about them.

For stories about cattle and stockyards, read farm.FM's ranching pages or a farm.FM story on the stockyards.