Fort Worth Stockyards Hog and Sheep Markets

🏛️The era

Fort Worth earned the nickname "Cowtown" in the years after the Civil War, when cattle drives headed north toward the railheads passed nearby. Once railroads reached the city, it could ship livestock itself, and in 1887 the Fort Worth Union Stock Yards were established to gather animals for market.

The real boom came after 1903, when the major national meatpacking firms Swift and Armour opened large plants beside the stockyards. Packers need a steady, varied supply of animals, and Texas ranching was almost all about cattle. That gap is where this marker's story begins.

The early twentieth century was also an era of organized promotion and scientific farming. Agricultural clubs for young people, prize competitions and campaigns to change what farmers raised were spreading across rural America. Fort Worth's stockyards put all of those tools to work.

👥People & events

The stockyards' first efforts to get Texans raising hogs went nowhere. So in 1903, the year the big packers arrived, the Fort Worth Stockyards built new hog and sheep pens and launched a full promotional campaign. It offered cash and livestock prizes, along with a youth Pig Club program that put young people to work raising hogs of their own.

The results were dramatic. Hogs processed here rose from 150,527 in 1903 to more than a million in 1917. Sheep ran from roughly 100,000 to several hundred thousand a year from 1903 through the 1920s. By 1936 Texas led the nation in both cattle and sheep, and for one week in the spring of 1937 Fort Worth received more sheep than any other principal market in the country.

World War II drove the numbers higher still, as a nation at war needed meat, wool and leather. Hog totals passed a million in both 1943 and 1944. From 1943 through 1946, more than two million sheep a year passed through these pens.

The hog and sheep markets helped make Fort Worth one of the nation's great livestock centers during the 1940s and 1950s.

🇺🇸Its place in the American story

The cowboy dominates the popular image of Texas ranching, but this marker tells the other half of the story. Fort Worth became a national livestock center by broadening beyond cattle, and by deliberately persuading ranchers and farm families to raise hogs and sheep alongside them.

The Pig Club program ties the site to a wider American movement. Clubs that taught young people modern agricultural methods were spreading nationally in these same years, and they were early ancestors of the youth farm organizations that are still familiar today. Here, that movement served a very practical goal: feeding the packing plants.

The wartime figures connect the stockyards to the home front. Meat for soldiers and civilians and wool for uniforms all depended on places like this, where animals from ranches across the region came together to be sold and processed for the nation.

🧭If you visit

The Fort Worth Stockyards survive as a historic district, and as you walk among the old pens, barns and brick streets, the scale of the place begins to make sense. Look for the livestock pens and try to picture them full of hogs and sheep, not just the cattle the district is best known for.

The district is lively, with western shops, restaurants and entertainment, and visitors often come for the cattle-themed events and the sight of longhorns in the streets. This marker gives you a fuller story to carry through it: the stockyards were built on many kinds of livestock, and on a campaign that changed what Texans raised.

The Stockyards are on the north side of Fort Worth, an easy stop from anywhere in the Dallas–Fort Worth area. Give yourself time to wander the district on foot.