Fort Worth Stock Yards Company

Two early moves beyond the pens shaped the market. In 1896 the owners began a market newspaper, which the Handbook of Texas says survives as the Weekly Livestock Reporter, the largest livestock paper in the Southwest. In 1897 and 1898 the company worked with the federal Bureau of Animal Industry on cattle dipping to kill ticks. Ticks carried Texas fever, a disease Midwestern farmers had blamed on Texas herds since the 1860s, and Bureau scientists identified its parasite in 1893. Dipping later eliminated the disease in the United States.

What the plaque says

Fort Worth Stock Yards Company The Fort Worth Stock Yards Company was created in 1893, when Boston capitalist Greenlief W. Simpson led a group of investors in purchasing the Fort Worth Union Stock Yards. Under Simpson's leadership, the Company earned the support of the Texas Cattle Raisers Association and lured the prominent meatpacking companies of Armour and Swift to open plants here. Publicity through the Company's market newspaper and annual Fat Stock Show, both begun in 1896, resulted in a significant increase in the number of animals brought to market. The Stock Yards Co. built the area's livestock-related facilities and had controlling interest in many North Fort Worth businesses and properties. The first five decades of the 20th Century were the most successful for the Fort Worth Stock Yards Co. During World War I, foreign governments purchased draft animals, making Fort Worth the largest horse and mule market in the world. In 1917, overall livestock market receipts reached 3,500,000 and in 1944, sales exceeded 5,000,000 head of livestock. However, by the 1950s, local auctions were drawing sellers away from this central market. Today the Fort Worth Stock Yards Co. continues as a significant part of the city's unique heritage. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards — steps away
  The brick-street cattle market where Armour and Swift built packing plants in 1902, now a National Register district with a Coliseum, a museum and a longhorn drive twice a day.
• Tarrant County Courthouse — 2.3 mi
  A pink-granite courthouse of 1895 on the bluff where the Army set up Fort Worth in 1849, in a county named for the man who led the 1841 attack on the Native villages of Village Creek.
• Kimbell Art Museum — 3.0 mi
  Louis Kahn's cycloid-vaulted museum of 1972, built from Kay Kimbell's bequest and joined in 2013 by Renzo Piano's pavilion for the exhibitions the Kahn galleries could not hold.
• National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame — 3.4 mi
  A hall of fame begun in Hereford in 1975 to honor rodeo women, widened in 1977 to Western heritage, and housed in Fort Worth's Cultural District since 2002.

More markers nearby

• Fort Worth Stockyards Horse and Mule Barns — steps away
• Coliseum — steps away
• Fort Worth Stockyards Hog and Sheep Markets — steps away
• Niles City — steps away