Swift & Company

The Handbook of Texas follows the money. Swift and Armour each received about twenty-two acres, a third of the stockyards company and a share of a $100,000 fund raised by Fort Worth citizens, in return for sending their slaughter through the yards. Swift's plant opened in March 1904, during the fat stock show. With Armour it co-owned a belt railway, a bank and a cattle loan company until the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act forced them out. In 1962 and 1969 the packinghouse workers' union took pay cuts to save the plant, which closed in 1971.

What the plaque says

Swift & Company A leading national meatpacking firm by the 1880s, Swift & Co. adopted a practice of opening branch plants nearer the source of supply. Attracted to Texas by the State's vast livestock herds, the Company chose this site for a new operation as a result of efforts by the Fort Worth Stock Yards Company. The plant opened in 1903 and soon had a dramatic impact on the economy of the City and the State. It also spawned several support businesses, including a railway company and publishing firm. The Swift plant remained in operation until 1971. (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 — 3.5 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

• Armour and Company — steps away
• Niles City — steps away
• Fort Worth Stockyards Hog and Sheep Markets — steps away
• Quanah Parker — steps away