Armour and Company

Armour & Company was an American meatpacking company founded in Chicago, in 1867, by the Armour brothers, led by Philip Danforth Armour. By 1880, the company had become Chicago's most important business and had helped make Chicago and its the center of America's meatpacking industry. During the same period, its facility in Omaha, Nebraska, boomed, as well, making the city's meatpacking industry the largest in the nation by 1959. In the 1980s, the Armour brand was split between shelf-stable meat products and refrigerated meat products. Today, each is owned by different entities.

The Armour Star (shelf-stable) brand includes meat-based lard and canned entrees, including hash, chili, stews, and potted meats. The rights to the Armour Star food brand are owned by Pinnacle Foods. The Armour brand for refrigerated meats is now owned by Smithfield Foods of Smithfield, Virginia, through their affiliate, Armour Eckrich LLC. The Armour brand for use in the pharmaceutical industry is owned by Forest Laboratories.

Armour & Company had its roots in Milwaukee, where in 1863 Philip D. Armour joined with John Plankinton, the founder of the Layton and Plankinton Packing Company in 1852 to establish Plankinton, Armour and Co. Together, the partners expanded Plankinton's Milwaukee meat packing operation and established branches in Chicago and Kansas City and an exporting house in New York City. Armour and Plankinton dissolved their partnership in 1884 with the Milwaukee operation eventually becoming the Cudahy Packing Company.

In its early years, Armour sold every kind of consumer product made from animals: not only meats but also glue, oil, fertilizer, hairbrushes, buttons, oleomargarine, and drugs made from slaughterhouse byproducts. Armour operated in an environment without labor unions, health inspections, or government regulation. Accidents were commonplace. Armour was notorious for the low pay it offered its line workers. It fought unionization by banning known union activists and by breaking strikes in 1904 and 1921, employing African Americans and new immigrants as strikebreakers. The company did not become fully unionized until the late 1930s when the Meatpacking Union succeeded in creating an interracial industrial union as part of the Congress of Industrial Organizations.

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