DUANE
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Duane's take
Here's how the official marker tells it, and I'll do my best to do it justice. Picture the Texas coastal bend in the last half of the nineteenth century. Hundreds of thousands of wild longhorns roaming South Texas, free for the taking, so plentiful they were almost worthless.
Now, that sounds like opportunity, and it was, but it also came with a problem that would take some creative thinking to solve. You couldn't ship live cattle to the eastern population centers. You couldn't preserve beef on site well enough to transport it later.
So what do you do with all that beef? Well, you figure out what else those animals are worth. And that's exactly what local entrepreneurs did.
Hides went to leather production. Horn got turned into buttons and combs. Ground bones became fertilizer.
Small amounts of meat were preserved by pickling, though the marker is careful to note the process was relatively ineffective. Every part of the animal that could be turned into a dollar, was. The rest got left behind, and that's where things get grim.
Because of how low the monetary value of cattle was, factories often stripped the hides and the other non-edible parts right off the carcasses and left the meat to spoil where it lay. Terrible odors. Pest infestations.
Waste dumped into the bays and channels. The facilities caused real problems in sanitation and public health along that coast. And yet, for several decades, they thrived.
Packing and rendering plants dotted the coastline. Packery Channel itself was named for the facilities located right along that waterway. Then came the hard winters and droughts of 1873 and 1874.
The cattle supply depleted. When cattle aren't plentiful, they aren't cheap, and when they aren't cheap, you can't afford to slaughter them just for hides, tallow and bones. The math stopped working.
And so, by the late 1870s, most of the facilities shuttered their doors. The whole industry, built on abundance, undone the moment that abundance ran dry.
What the marker says
Facilities for the rendering of hides and tallow and for meat packing flourished along the Texas coastal bend during the last half of the nineteenth century, when hundreds of thousands of wild longhorns roamed South Texas; packery channel was named for the facilities located along the waterway. At a time when long-term meat preservation was unavailable, the abundance of free range cattle and the inability to either ship the live cattle to eastern population centers or to effectively and efficiently preserve beef on site for later transport caused local entrepreneurs to develop ways to produce other marketable products from the animals. Hides were used in leather production, buttons and combs were made out of horn, and ground bones were used to produce fertilizer. Small amounts of meat were preserved by pickling, but the process was relatively ineffective. Many documented packing and rendering plants dotted the coast, and waste was dumped into the bays and channels. The factories caused additional problems in sanitation and public health. Because of the abundance of cattle and their resulting low monetary value, factories often stripped the hides and other non-edible parts from the carcasses and left the meat to spoil, causing terrible odors and pest infestations. The factories thrived for several decades, but hard winters and droughts in 1873 and 1874 depleted the cattle supply, making it no longer profitable to slaughter cattle just for their hides, tallow and bones. Because of this change in the cattle market, most of the facilities shuttered their doors by the late 1870s.