DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about Armour and Company up in Tarrant County. Now, some deals get made over handshakes at the courthouse, and some get made by men who know exactly what a city needs before the city quite knows it itself. This is one of those stories.
The year was 1901, and two local business leaders — G. W. Simpson and L.
V. Niles — sat down and started negotiating with Armour and Company. And Armour and Company was not just any outfit.
It was one of the nation's four largest meatpacking firms. Four largest. In the whole country.
So Simpson and Niles weren't thinking small. They wanted a branch plant right there in Fort Worth, and they went after it. The Fort Worth Stock Yards Company sweetened the deal — land and other incentives — and by 1902, construction of a plant just north of this very site was already underway.
Now here's what that plant became: it was instrumental — that's the word the marker uses, instrumental — in building Fort Worth into the livestock center of the Southwest. Not just the operation itself, but all the support businesses that grew up around it, feeding off it, thriving alongside it. For over fifty years that plant ran.
Over fifty years of cattle and commerce and the kind of noise and smell and industry that means a city is alive and working. It finally closed in 1962. But you don't measure a thing only by when it stopped.
You measure it by what it built while it was running — and what it built was a city's identity.
What the marker says
In 1901, local business leaders G. W. Simpson and L. V. Niles began negotiating with Armour & Co. one of the nation' four largest meatpacking firms, to encourage establishment of a branch plant in Fort Worth. The Fort Worth Stock Yards Co. offered land and other incentives and by 1902, construction of a plant just north of this site was underway. The new operation was instrumental in the city's development as the livestock center of the Southwest, creating a number of support businesses. It remained in operation for over 50 years, closing in 1962. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986