[2] This was due in no small part to the advent of the railroads, which by this time crossed much of the country and connected previously isolated producers to one another in a more expedient fashion.
It was these problems that caused a group of eastern financiers to invest in the construction of a large stockyard complex outside the already well-established rail center of East St.
Mayor Bowman acquiesced to these conditions, and the agreement was made official on July 17, 1872, at the East St. Louis city council meeting.
Griswold for $145,000, and 256 acres (1.04 km2) from Virginia Matthews for $50,000)[2] on the northeast edge of East St. Louis upon which to build their new stockyard operation, and construction had begun on May 30, 1871.
The National Stockyards had been built to accommodate up to 15,000 head of cattle, 10,000 sheep, 20,000 hogs, in addition to a large quantity of non-meat animals such as horses and mules.
The St. Louis Beef Canning Company relocated to the Stockyards in 1879,[6] and was followed closely by plants owned by the big-name meatpacking firms.
[6] There were also many other smaller firms who built plants near the yards, who along with the big operations helped to make the St. Louis area—and specifically the St. Louis National Stockyards—one of the nation’s premier meatpacking centers,[2][3] with the Stockyards directly employing 1,200 workers and processing approximately 50,000 animals weekly and boasting sales of more than $2 million each year at the turn of the 20th century.
[2] Another major development came as the meatpacking firms began to realize that they could use the vast amount of animal by-products produced by their factories to create new industries—some of which became established at the Stockyards.
[5] Other industries related to livestock also became established there, such as seed and feed businesses, companies that dealt in hardware and farm machinery, lumber, and fertilizer, and tanning and rendering plants.
As the St. Louis National Stockyards and its related industries grew and became established, they returned no small dividends for their investors and provided large profits for both livestock owners and meatpacking firms.
The federal government began to push for food regulations and standards, spurred on by Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, which chronicled the meatpacking industry; the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt had begun to oppose what it called the “beef trust”; and the city of East St. Louis had tried to annex the yards, in violation of the agreement it had made with the company prior to the construction of the complex.
[6] The town consisted of two streets a block long, with about 40 houses arranged in four rows on them, a building that served as a church and school, a police/fire station and a store.
[6] This control enabled the St. Louis National Stockyards Company to efficiently run its own affairs with minimal outside governmental interference such as taxation and regulation.
[6] National City was the first industrial suburb outside East St. Louis, and it would set an example to be followed by other major industries in the St. Louis area, establishing such other company towns on the Illinois side of the Mississippi as Granite City (steel), Alorton (aluminum), Sauget (chemicals) and Wood River and Roxana (oil refinery).
This law gave to the U.S. Department of Agriculture regulatory rights over ownership, trading practices and financial transactions in the stockyard industry.
[2] Following World War II, the Stockyards would respond to the evolution of the nation’s transportation network and the increasing mechanization of industry.
The yards were converted to handle truck traffic, and the last auctions of work horses and mules took place in 1948, as those animals became obsolete with the increasing ubiquity of farm machinery.
Apprehensive of a unified, well-organized labor force, meatpackers—like many other industrialists of this period—hired people from many diverse, non-English-speaking ethnic groups in order to hinder the organization of their employees into unions.
These changes in management/labor would eventually play a major role in the packing companies choosing to relocate to the countryside in search of cheaper, nonunion labor.
[2] The advent of the truck—and later, the interstate highway system—coupled with rising labor costs connected to unionization and the antiquation of outdated factories was causing the meatpacking industry to decentralize and relocate away from centralized terminal markets such as National City to rural areas, where it could find cheaper, nonunion labor, build new factories close to the livestock producers and buy directly from them, thus eliminating the middleman of the stockyard industry and cutting costs.
In 1965, the St. Louis Metro-East region, of which National City was a part, had 43 packing plants processing 100,000 animals weekly; by 1970, just five years later, there were 32.
They introduced the first stocker and feeder cattle auctions in October 1960, and they undertook conversion projects aimed at making the yards more truck-friendly, but these efforts to revitalize the Stockyards were ultimately unsuccessful.
[citation needed] Fire Chief Charles Schreiber and other firefighters arrived within minutes of the alarm but it was too late to get any apparatus out of the building.
Schreiber immediately requested mutual aid from the Brooklyn, East St. Louis, Fairmont City and Caseyville fire departments.
The Board relied on an Illinois statute that permitted the dissolution of an incorporated community that had fewer than 50 residents according to the most recent federal census.
National City, as well as private citizens who had intervened in the case, appealed the order, but the Illinois Appellate Court affirmed it on October 3, 1997.
[11] In addition, as of April 2010, there were several construction projects begun on the property as part of what was called the National City Redevelopment Area.
A further injection of life into the area came with the planning and construction of the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge, which carries Interstate 70 over the Mississippi River and which opened to traffic in February 2014.
[12] In 1990, National City received attention because of the large number of traffic tickets that its police department issued for moving violations on the one-mile stretch of Illinois Route 3 that bisected the small town.
The town's assistant police chief said that the enforcement program had been started five or six years earlier after residents complained about the number of accidents on Route 3.