From Quad-City Times Monday December 15, 1980
By John Williard
An Era Goes Out With The HogsOscar Mayer slaughter operation links back to Davenport’s Foundations
When the last squealing hog meets its maker at Oscar Mayer & Co.’s Davenport plant next spring, an era will die with it. Hog slaughtering has been a part of the Davenport scene ever since sausage-craving Germans began settling in the mid-19th century. Growing from small butcher shops into sprawling brick structures that dominated the city’s west end, the packing industry helped lay the foundation for modern Davenport. The city located in the heart of a two-state pork producing capital, would become one of the largest hog slaughtering centers in the nation. In 1895, more than a half –dozen packing firms supplied a city on the move with bacon, pork, ham and sausage. Most packers were clustered in the same area where Oscar Mayer plant is today – along West 2nd Street near Fillmore, close to the Mississippi. Before refrigeration, packers cut ice from the river to cool their meats.
The early Davenport packers included Henry Kohrs, 1343 W.2nd St., John Ranzow, 1334 W. 2nd St.; John Ruch, south side of 2nd near Fillmore; and John L. Zoeckler, 1337 W. 2nd St. Armour Packing Co. also had a plant extending from 101 to 115 Perry Street. The offices of the Davenport Beef Co. were at the corner of Perry and Front Street (River Drive). Another leading packer at the turn of the century was Tri-City Packing and Provision Co. on South Howell Street.
The Davenport packers kept steamboats busy. Packets heavy with sow-bellies cruised downriver to the South, supplying blacks with the poorer quality meats. Sweat smelling Westphalian hams produced in Davenport were shipped to leading restaurants throughout the Midwest. Davenport’s largest and most successful packer was Kohrs Packing Co., the nucleus for Oscar Mayer. At the time Kohrs was acquired by Oscar Mayer in 1946, it was paying pork producers in excess of $5 million a year. Kohrs was founded in 1872 by Henry Kohrs, one of the many Germans who found freedom from the political upheaval of his homeland on the broad prairies of Scott County. The company grew from a corner butcher shop into an international supplier of pork products. By the 1940’s, Kohrs’ fleet of refrigerated railroad cars carried the company’s red and yellow Crown Brand symbol to New York, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans, Mobile, Baton Rouge, Meridian, Miss., Houston, and Los Angeles.
Before the turn-of-the-century, Davenport’s packing house district was a miniature version of Chicago’s famed Union Stockyards. Wagon teams from Scott County farms hauled plump. Corn fed hogs to stockyards bounded by 2nd, 3rd, Fillmore and Myrtle streets. After their hogs tipped the scales at the old Schroeder & Brandt weighing station, farmers collected their cash. Then, with their wives in tow, they might shop for millinery, shawls and cloaks at J. H. C. Petersen’s, the Boston Store or other department stores on 2nd Street. Back at the packing plants, the hogs were corralled in holding pens. They were pushed together so tightly that a man could walk across their backs. Leon Zoeckler, Davenport, was one those who walked piggyback. Zoeckler, 90, is the grandson of pioneer pork packer, John L. Zoeckler. As a youngster, Zoeckler armed himself with a .22-caliber rifle and walked across the hog’s backs, dispatching each animal with a quick shot to the head.
The animals were bled, scalded in boiling vats to remove hair and butchered. The intestines were boiled, and the resulting grease was sold to soap plants. The intestines were used as fertilizer. The stench of the boiling hog innards was unbearable, and Zoeckler’s mother would scold him if he got to close to the pot. His clothes would stink for days. The odor of the slaughter houses was overpowering on the west end, but residents didn’t seem to mind. “We never complained about the smell. It was our daily bread,” Zoeckler said. Zoeckler, a retired insurance agent, still has a receipt from his grandfather’s business. It dates back to 1898, the year Ed Platt’s delicatessen on 3rd Street ordered 69 pounds of bacon from John L. Secker. The bill was $4.83, or seven cents a pound!
Others associated with the city’s meat packing industry included John H. “Harry” Gehrmann, 89, Davenport. Gehrmann, a grandson of pioneer packer Henry Kohrs, was a partner and vice president of Kohrs Packing Co. When the plant was acquired by Oscar Mayer in 1946, John H. Gehrmann turned over the keys. Gehrmann joined the company after earning a master’s degree in chemical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and working briefly for a packing house machinery manufacturer in Detroit. He played a role in Kohrs expansion during the 1920s.
About the time Leon Zoeckler was assassinating hogs at his grandfather’s plant next door to Kohrs, young Gehrmann was watching packing house workers take their lunch at the saloon on the corner of 2nd and Fillmore. They’d reach for their personalized beer tankards that dangled from a rack above the long bar. A work day at the packing plants typically began at 7 a.m. In the days before refrigeration, all slaughtering was done in the winter months only. After the hogs were butchered, the hams and bacon were wrapped in paper and then placed in canvas sacks sewn by a crew of women seamstresses. The canvas-covered meats were dipped in a glue solution to protect them from the penetrating bites of blow flies. The meats were stored in ice cut from Credit Island harbor. Men with wagon teams moved out of the frozen surface to harvest ice. They sawed lagged blocks of ice and hauled them to the packing plant ice houses. Fritz T. Schmidt, a wine maker on Fairmont Street, allowed Kohrs to use his 30-foot deep aging caves as a supplementary cooling area.
All work done at the Davenport packing plants was done by hand until 1898. That year, William H. Gehrmann, John H. Gehrmann’s father, ushered in the industrial age by installing a back fat cutter at Kohrs. William H. Gehrmann had been a partner in the company, and he became president after Henry Kohrs death in 1917. Gehrmann continued to expand and modernized the plant in the 1920s. New construction included the four-story “hog hotel,” a containment area where doomed porkers spent their last hours. More than 3, 500 hogs could be accommodated in rooms equipped with running water. William H. Gehrmann was a former physical education teacher who married one of Henry Kohrs’ daughters. He learned the meat packing business in Montana where he worked at a plant owned by copper king Marcus Daly, founder of the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. Gehrmann also traveled to Germany to learn modern packing technology.
The new technology did not did not extend to sanitation. Te main sewer was the Mississippi River. As a youngster, Leon Zoeckler remembers dodging mound of hog entrails while swimming near the Crescent railroad bridge. “I was swimming in garbage. I think the river is much cleaner today. Even the clams are coming back.” Zoeckler said. The packing houses harbored colonies of rats attracted by the open dumps of hog guts. During periods of high water, the rats scaled willow trees to escape the flood. Young Leon and his friends would pick off the rodents with .22-caliber rifles. The city later ordered a halt to their marksmanship practice.
Federal inspection of meats started in 1904, a factor that forced packers to upgrade their sanitation procedures. Two years later, Kohrs bought Zoeckler’s, and the company continued to modernize. The entire plant was rebuilt in 1915. During Prohibition, the adjacent Davenport Brewing and Malting Co. dried up. After a brief life as a produce market, the brewery building was purchased in 1926 by Kohrs and turned into a cold storage facility. The stockyards disappeared in the early 190s as farmers began selling directly to packers. Kohrs still was a busy place as convoys of Ford Model A trucks rolled into the plant from eastern Iowa farms during the 1920s and 1930s. Alfred Arp, 85, an Eldridge area farmer, once trucked in a 500-pound hog during the depths of the Great Depression. He received the not so piggish sum of $7.50 for the critter. “We didn’t stick around town in those days to shop. We took our cash and left quickly.” Arp said.
The president of the company during this period was Frank Kohrs, son of Henry Kohrs. Frank Kohrs was elected president and general manager after the death of William Gehrmann in 1933. A patrician man with snowy white hair and fine tailored suits, Frank Kohrs served as trustee of the Municipal Art Gallery and as a director of the Chamber of Commerce. He died in 1956 at the age of 80. The Kohrs president surrounded himself with European antiques at his palatial home high atop the Marquette Street bluff. The stately Victorian mansion, built in 1879 by furrier Targott Richter, is the Ten Twelve Marquette Restaurant today. Frank Kohrs' company was a tempting piece of meat when Oscar Mayer began looking for new acquisitions after World War II. By 1946, the company was shipping 200, 000 pounds of meat daily from its plants.
The Kohrs plant offered a good opportunity for Oscar Mayer to strengthen its competitive position in the U. S. heartland, and Kohrs was ready to sell. “I was the last active partner. There was no one else in the family old enough to take over,” John Gehrmann recalls. The Madison, Wis., meat packer took over Kohrs in 1946, leasing the plant first and then buying it. Ironically, the acquisition coincided with Kohrs’ 75th anniversary. The company had published a lavishly illustrated, 60-page Diamond Jubilee history for its employees.
“Today Kohrs is looking forward to even greater production, to greater internal expenditures and to greater service to customers here in the Middle West and to others from coast to coast, from border to border, wherever Kohrs is known for quality Crown Brand pork products,” the Diamond Jubilee book said. The growth would come under the flag of Oscar Mayer & Co. Like Kohrs, Oscar Mayer & Co. also traced its roots to a German-born-butcher—Oscar Mayer who started with a Chicago meat market in 1883. Oscar Mayer & Co quickly began expanding and modernizing the Davenport Plant. Today it is Oscar Mayer’s second largest plant. Oscar Mayer didn’t want Kohrs cold storage plant. Kohrs Cold Storage Co. remains an independent business today under the leadership of Carl Gehrmann, John H. Gehrmann’s son. The Oscar Mayer take over came off without a hitch, John H. Gehrmann said, “We turned over 3000 employees and a million dollars in assets. We closed the door one night, they opened it the next morning.” Although Kohrs’ Mack trucks aren’t seen on Quad City streets, the name Kohrs Packing Co. lives on. Kohrs is no longer king but the crown lives on.
