Carl Sandburg's poetic epithet for Chicago, "hog butcher for the world," is often misremembered as "hog butcher to the world," but that is perhaps less a mistake than a sign of how much the phrase now belongs to popular memory, along with the phrase "city of [the] big shoulders," from the same poem. Though the stockyards have long been closed, the repetition of these phrases continues to carry a memory of Chicago's industrial past, even to many who will never read Sandburg's poems nor any of the many histories of the stockyards.

Author: Carl Sandburg
Source: Chicago Historical Society (ICHi-37950)