Moving Livestock to Market
Railroads played an important role in Nebraska history. The towns with train depots thrived. Livestock, grain,
consumer goods to be sold in stores, and passengers all moved
by train in the 1920s. Most farmers in York County shipped their
cattle by train to Omaha, one of the country's biggest
stockyards. At one time, the Omaha stockyards were bigger and
busier than the Chicago stockyards.
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| The stockyards at
Omaha were the world's largest. |
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| A farmer and a business
man discuss a deal at the stockyards. |
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During the 1920s, two sale barns opened in the town of York,
saving transportation costs for farmers who wanted to buy
and sell cattle, hogs, calves, or sheep. Farmers could go
to the sale barn in nearby York and sell their cattle at an
auction rather than shipping their cattle to Omaha and selling
them through a commission office.
Children were not allowed on stock trains, but Kenneth Jackson
recalls the time his father took him on a train to the Omaha
Stockyards.
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| Hundreds of cattle
being moved around made the stockyards a busy and
dangerous place for a young kid. |
 "They
weren't supposed to have children on a stock train,
but the depot agent at Liston sold my dad a ticket for
me. And we got to Lincoln, and we stopped off. They do
some switching in Lincoln on the trains, and they had
what they called a beanery there where the railroad help
worked. And so we got to eat lunch there. And then we
went to get on the train, why the conductor said I couldn't
get on 'cause you weren't supposed to have
kids on the train, on our freight train. And Dad said,
‘Well we got this far, what are you going to do
about it now?' And he said, ‘Well, come on.'
So he let me on and I got to ride clear to Omaha. And he
let us off out there in the railroad yard… We went
to the commission man's office and laid on the bench
until morning and then went out to the yards and found
our cattle. They used to get 15- or 20,000 head a day I
think in there. One time Omaha was the largest, even above
Chicago for the livestock market." -- Kenneth
Jackson  (Quicktime required) |
Written by Claudia Reinhardt.
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Moving Livestock to Market
