9,000 Hogs Slaughtered Daily in Dubuque

Being a newcomer to town, I have trouble believing that less than ten years ago several thousand hogs were slaughtered each day in Dubuque at “The Pack” processing plant.

According to Dubuque, the Encyclopedia by Randolph W. Lyon (1991) and the Telegraph Herald (”The Pack” by M.D. Kittle, July 31, 2005), about 3,500 Dubuque Packing Company employees processed 9,000 hogs daily during peak production in the 1970s. If processing was continuous, as it must have been, 375 hogs were processed every hour, which is over 6 hogs per minute.

Even as late as 1997, between 6,000 and 7,000 hogs per day were slaughtered in Dubuque (”Meatpacker Weathers Controversy” by Kathy Bergstrom, TH, October 19, 1997).

It’s hard to imagine the logistics of such an operation, the semi-truck and railroad traffic, crowded stockyards, deafening noise of animals and machinery, nauseating stench, relentless back-breaking work, and so on.

Astonishingly, “The Pack” is rubble today, recently demolished to make way for a shopping center. After years of losing millions of dollars, severe pay and benefit cuts, thousands of layoffs, and a series of questionable sellouts, “The Pack” closed for good in 2001.

To learn more about the rise and fall of meat packing in Dubuque, this weekend I checked out a copy of The Dubuque Packing Company & Charles E. Stoltz by Thomas Gifford (1997) from the library at the University of Dubuque. I’ll post a summary of this odd book in the next week or two.

For current information about large-scale pork processing, see this December 2006 video clip from PBS about the Smithfield Meatpacking Plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina, a plant where 5,500 workers slaughter 33,000 hogs each day.