The "Street Herders" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Mom just made me come in from the front porch because she saw a herd of steers running up the street.  Yep, a herd of steers!  Used to happen every so often when we lived in the last block of North Queen Street near the  Lancaster Railroad Station.  

One of my Polaroid manipulations of the entrance
to the Lancaster Stockyards.  The gates at the far
end were used for loading and unloading livestock.

Seems that we not only lived near the railroad, but near the largest stockyards this side of Chicago and quite a few times the animals that had been brought to the stockyards for selling or trading would escape the confines of the stockyards and head in whatever direction they found that wasn't filled with cars and trucks.  Right next to the stockyards was a bridge over the railroad tracks that would carry them one block to our house.  At times you would see men chasing after them while other times you could see men on horseback riding after them.  At times they would find their way into my backyard and start eating the grass.  As a kid, it was neat to look out and see the steers munching on the grass.  The Lancaster Stockyards was a 22-acre maze of wooden fences that held the thousands of cattle, sheep and pigs that were transported there for sale or trade.  The stockyards was founded in 1895 along the old Pennsylvania Railroad at the boundary of Lancaster City and Manheim Township.  They traded and sold cattle hogs, sheep and horses.  

Aerial view of the stockyards.  The
Lititz Pike (Rt. 501) is in the distance.

Lancaster opened earlier than any other stockyards in the nation and so set the standard for livestock prices in Chicago, Omaha and points west.  In the early 1920s, before I was born, drovers, who lived at a small hotel by the stockyards, herded thousands of cattle along city streets and into the yards.  They would also be paid 25 cents a head to walk them to nearby Ephrata or Lititz.  Other animals arrived by rail and later by truck.  Hundreds of men worked night and day to move the meat to market.  By the 1940s, when I was born, the stockyards was processing 10,000 cattle a day and over half a  million head of cattle each year.  In the mid-50s I often would travel the couple of blocks with my next-door neighbor, who was in his 50s, to the stockyards for straw and hay.  He would drive his old Studebaker to the rear of one of the barns and we would clean the straw and hay off the floors and stuff it in burlap bags.  We would use both for the  guinea pigs that we both raised and sold.  I had about 60 of them in my backyard while Bob had his in his garage.  My parents often thought it strange that a man in his 50s would want to raise guinea pigs with a 12 year old, and I guess they were right.  At first, livestock was sold by "private treaty," which is individual seller to buyer, but in 1964 dealers held their first public cattle auction in a new sales pavilion.  Cattle were driven in one door, weighed, paraded across the arena floor and herded out another door as the buyers were bidding on them.  Every so often a steer would jump over the rails that held the cattle on the arena floor and crate havoc in the stands.  

Stalls where I would get my straw and hay.

As late as 1994 the stockyards auctioned off 70,000 head of cattle during the year, but eventually Walter Dunlap & Sons, the largest dealer, stopped trading and shortly thereafter the stockyards declined.  For years a few of the cattlemen who had offices at the stockyards still kept a few cattle or hogs in their pens, but not to the extent that had been done in the past.  The stockyards was starting to collapse, the wood was rotting and the fences were starting to crumble.  

Amish dismantle the calf barn to move it to Myerstown.
Lancaster Newspaper photograph.

The once proud and famous Lancaster Stockyards was dying.  Then the looters started taking just about anything of value.  In 2008 the old calf barn, one of the final remaining buildings, was dismantled by Amishmen who moved it to Myerstown, PA and reassembled it. Shortly after that there were two discoveries of mosquitoes carrying West Nile virus at the Lancaster Stockyards so city officials completed negotiations to have the buildings and debris removed within a month.  The property, worth millions, had many prospective buyers in the past 5 years, but nothing really materialized.  Today there are a few buildings that house insurance and investment offices, but much of the space stands vacant.  Not sure who is paying the property taxes on it, but I guess that isn't my concern.  I miss the old Lancaster Stockyards.  I buried many a dead pet in the field across from the stockyards which is not a building that rents storage space.  I also used to ride my bike to the stockyards just to look through the fences at the steers, hogs and goats.  Pretty neat place in its heyday, at least to an impressionable kid.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.