This compelling history chronicles some of the most intense and tragic fires in Chicago’s storied meatpacking district.

Chicago’s Union Stock Yards made the city “the hog butcher of the world,” but the notoriety came at a grievous cost. From their opening on Christmas Day of 1865 to their final closure in July of 1971, The Yards were the site of nearly three hundred extra-alarm fires. That infamous history includes some of the most disastrous conflagrations of a city famous for fire.

In 1910, twenty-one firemen and three civilians were killed in a blaze at a beef warehouse—the largest death toll for an organized fire department in the nation prior to 9/11. The meatpackers who ran the yards considered the constant threat of fire as part of the cost of doing business, shrugging it off with an, “It’s all right, we're fully covered.” For the firefighters who were forced to plunge into the flames again and again, it was an entirely different matter.

Alex A. Burkholder

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