A Fire Strikes the Chicago Stock Yards

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, tw