The House of Morrell; with a foreword by William ... - University Library

on the Missouri. Three other railroads (including the Burlington
and Missouri) had tapped the Missouri at Council Bluffs by 1869.
The invention of the refrigerator car was followed by the first shipment
of meat from Chicago to New York in 1869 — the very year
that Council Bluffs achieved its union with the Atlantic seaboard by
four different railroads. The stage was now set for establishing flourishing
meat packing plants in the inland towns of the Hawkeye State.
Railroads and refrigeration, the presence of the Des Moines river
and a struggling packing plant, coupled with Ottumwa's favorable
position on the frontier, all combined to cause Thomas D. Foster to
select the county seat of Wapello County as the site of the first great
western packing plant of John Morrell & Co. in 1877. Foster in later
years recalled that as a lad in Ireland he had seen a box of bacon
packed by "Mitchell, Ladd & Co., Ottumwa, Iowa, U. S. A." He
never forgot the name, and when he visited the town later on he
found it located on the largest inland Iowa river with superior railroad
connections. These advantages, combined with a good supply
of intelligent laborers and a progressive citizenry anxious to secure
the Morrell plant, had swung the decision of Thomas D. Foster in
favor of Ottumwa.
Time proved the wisdom displayed in selecting Ottumwa. A
glance into the Iowa Agricultural Report for 1878 reveals that in
the three years beginning with 1874 the Burlington and Missouri railroad
transported an annual average of half a million live hogs eastward
over its lines, or almost one-third the total number of live hogs
carried eastward by the twelve major Iowa railroads. The Keokuk
and Des Moines (which likewise passed through Ottumwa) stood
fourth among Iowa railroads in this period, transporting an average
of
140,000 live hogs eastward each year.
The strategic position of Ottumwa in the hog belt insured a
healthy growth for pork packing. In 1877 Iowa led the states in hog
production with 3,263,200 head; in 1942 Morrell plants at Ottumwa,
Sioux Falls, S. D., and Topeka, Kans., packed 3,059,561 hogs. This
was almost seven times as many as were packed by the fourteen leading
hog centers in Iowa in 1877, which with the smaller packing