Kohrs Packing Plant 1910

Photo of Kohrs Packing Plant (Davenport, Iowa) 1910

Vacancies at the Grand Hog Hotel

Quad Cities Times

By John Willard | Tuesday, June 06, 2006

For generations, the five-story, 120,000-square foot structure that loomed over west Davenport was the final destination for hogs in a meat processing operation that made the city one of the largest hog slaughtering centers in the nation.

Until it was phased out in the 1980s, the hog kill operation — under Oscar Mayer and its predecessor, Kohrs Packing Co. — had been a vital part of the city’s economy. Other packing plants such as Armour Packing Co. brought an overpowering odor to the west end, but residents didn’t seem to mind.

“We never complained about the smell. It was our daily bread,” a worker once recalled.

Now that Triumph Foods has the financial incentives to proceed with its $130 million pork processing plant in East Moline, let’s look back at the meat packing industry that once thrived in Davenport.

In 1895, the city counted more than a half-dozen packing firms producing bacon, pork, ham and sausage. Most packers were clustered along West Second Street near Fillmore Street, where the present Kraft Foods/Oscar Mayer plant is today.

Davenport’s largest and most successful packer was Kohrs Packing Co. Founded in 1872 by Henry Kohrs, a German immigrant, the company grew from a corner butcher shop into an international supplier of pork products.

At the time Kohrs was acquired by Oscar Mayer in 1946, it was paying pork producers in excess of $5 million a year. During the 1920s and 1930s, the plant was a busy place as farmers and their Ford Model A trucks loaded with hogs rolled in from eastern Iowa.

Strategically located near the Mississippi River, a source of ice in the days before mechanical refrigeration, the plant was considered modern for its day. In an age before mechanization, its vertical design enabled animals to be lowered by gravity to the various slaughtering stages. The animals were bled, scalded in boiling vats to remove hair and butchered.

By the early 1980s, the plant had become obsolete for hog slaughtering operations, which had moved to efficient, single-story structures designed for rapid mechanized movement of animals.

Oscar Mayer’s Davenport plant shifted its focus to meat processing. The old “Hog Hotel” was razed in the early 1990s, along with other outdated spaces.

Today, Kraft Foods/Oscar Mayer employs 1,600 persons in Davenport, making it among the Quad-Cities’ five largest employers.


Vacancies at the grand Hog Hotel. Quad Cities Times by John Willard Tuesday, June 6th, 2006. Retrieved on 22 February 2008 from http://www.qctimes.com/articles/2006/06/06/opinion/columnists/john_willard/doc4485075a86528694724421.txt