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Armour/Morris Foreign Houses, 1924
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German-born Nelson Morris arrived in Chicago in 1854 and found work with meatpacker John B. Sherman. Morris started packing under his own name in 1859. During the Civil War, he sold cattle to the Union armies. Morris's company was one of the original meatpacking companies at the city's Union Stock Yard, which opened in 1865. By 1873, the company's annual sales were about $11 million. Like other leading Chicago packers such as Swift and Armour, Morris's operations extended across the nation during the last decades of the nineteenth century. The company owned packing plants in East St. Louis and Kansas City, as well as cattle ranches in Texas and the Dakotas. The Morris-owned Fairbank Canning Co. slaughtered more than 500,000 cattle a year by the beginning of the 1890s. At the turn of the century, Nelson Morris & Co. had nearly 100 branches across the United States and employed over 3,700 people at the Union Stock Yard. By the time the founder died, in 1907, annual sales had reached about $100 million. Still a leading American food company at the end of the 1910s, it was merged into Armour & Co. in 1923.
This entry is part of the Encyclopedia's
Dictionary of Leading Chicago Businesses (1820-2000)
that was prepared by Mark R. Wilson, with additional contributions from Stephen R. Porter and Janice L. Reiff.
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