National City, Illinois

National City was a suburb of East St. Louis, Illinois. Incorporated in 1907, it was a company town for the St. Louis National Stockyards Company. In 1996, the company, which owned all residential property in the town, evicted all of its residents. The following year, because it had no residents, National City was dissolved by court order. Its site was subsequently annexed by nearby Fairmont City, Illinois.

Following the American Civil War, the American economy began to undergo a dramatic change as smaller markets and operations were being replaced by more centralized and efficient ones. This was due in no small part to the advent of the railroads, which by this time crisscrossed much of the country and connected previously isolated producers to one another in a more expedient fashion. This transformation of the nation’s transportation network by railroads had a particularly strong impact on livestock-related industries. It eliminated the need for long cattle drives by connecting the producers of livestock (especially cattle) in the West with the major meat processing companies in the East. It also enabled livestock markets to become transregional, with animals being shipped to large, centralized markets for sale, processing and distribution. The result of this was that over time, smaller, localized markets became obsolete and a relatively small number of —markets built near important railroad centers—came to dominate the livestock and meatpacking industries.St. Louis, Missouri was a natural choice as one of these locations.

Situated near the juncture of the Missouri River and Mississippi River, the city of St. Louis had long been an important transportation center. Its access to these river systems coupled with its central location in the country had contributed to its becoming a major industrial center and railroad hub, with all the nation’s major rail lines converging in the city and from there running to all the different regions of the country. As railroads became the primary means by which livestock and processed meat was shipped, St. Louis developed into a major livestock and meatpacking center. This was also due to the fact that most of the U.S. population lived east of the Mississippi River prior to 1900, while most of the animals used to produce the meat it consumed were raised west of it, thus making St. Louis a logical place for the interchange between supply and demand in the meat market. However, the Mississippi River provided a hindrance to this movement of livestock and meat to the East at first, because until 1874, when the Eads Bridge was completed, no bridge linking Missouri to Illinois had been constructed. This meant that livestock from the West had to be unloaded in St. Louis, then ferried across the river to East St. Louis, Illinois, where it would then be stocked until it could be taken by railroad to eastern cities. This inefficiency provided additional costs to producers, both in time lost and money spent on ferry fees. It was these problems that caused a group of eastern financiers to invest in the construction of a large stockyard complex outside the already well-established rail center of East St. Louis.

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