(July 2023)
By Tim Spitzack
It’s been 33 years since the wrecking ball tore into the long-vacated remains of the Armour & Co. meatpacking plant in South St. Paul. Swing after swing, the once 22-building complex that sprawled across 47 acres was reduced to a pile of rubble. When the dust settled, all that remained were the red stone gates through which thousands of people had passed every day on their way to work.
The City of South St. Paul purchased the property in 1989 to incorporate into a planned industrial park that would encompass the Armour & Co. and Swift & Co. meatpacking plants and other operations of the former stockyards. In 2006, the City Council approved development plans for BridgePoint business park, and at that time chose to keep the historic gates intact.
Today, however, the gates are literally standing in the way of developing the last parcel of the Armour property. Their position in the triangular-shaped lot makes it impossible to construct a building that meets size requirements for the business park, and the gates are not in good enough shape to be moved. The conundrum has created tension between those who favor economic development and those who support historic preservation. As reported in our June issue, a community effort is underway to save the gates and potentially use the land around them for a park.
Preservationists say that the gates are the last vestige of the most significant era in the city’s history, representing deep ties to industry, immigration and the city’s growth. Armour and Co. was, after all, an economic giant that once operated 33 meatpacking plants in the United States and employed 60,000 people. Thee South St. Paul plant, which opened in 1919 with 2,000 employees, was the company’s largest and was reported to be the most modern meatpacking plant in the world. It was also the largest industrial plant in the Twin Cities at that time – and a melting pot. The company, like its rivals, heavily recruited workers from European countries. At its peak, the plant employed 4,000 people representing 20 ethnic groups, including Polish, Croatian, Serbian, Romanian, Slovakian, Irish and German. It even had its own branch of the St. Paul Public Library to assist those who wanted to learn, and those studying for citizenship.
With its state-of-the-art equipment, the plant was indeed a busy place, able to process nearly 1,900 head of livestock each hour. During WWII, it operated around the clock and called on workers to make sacrifices – namely losing overtime pay – to support the war effort. Following the war, a labor dispute between unions and meatpacking companies across the country quickly surfaced over wages. The result was a nationwide strike of the country’s largest meatpackers. On March 16, 1948, picket lines formed at the gates of the plants, including those in South St. Paul. The strike dragged on and eventually got ugly. In South St. Paul, there were skirmishes between strikers and South St. Paul police officers and soldiers of the National Guard, whom Minnesota Governor Luther Youngdahl had called in to quell the violence. The strike lasted 67 days.
Stockyard operations changed dramatically in the 1960s with the opening of regional packing plants across the country, thus eliminating the need for the larger central plants. Locally, Swift closed in 1969 and Armour in 1979. During those tumultuous years, South St. Paul watched as its economic base eroded and many of its residents lost their livelihoods.
If the Armour gates could talk, they’d have many stories to tell – and they’d be told in many different languages and dialects.
