Ontario Stock Yards

Photo by the City of Toronto - Posted November, 2011

Photo and transcription by contributor Wayne Adam - Posted November, 2011

Attached to this westbound St. Clair Avenue West transit shelter at Weston Road / Keele Street is this City of Toronto plaque. Here's what it says:

Plaque coordinates: 43.672502 -79.467923

After the Union Stockyards relocated from downtown to the southwest corner of St. Clair and Keele, it quickly became one of North America's largest and busiest stockyards and the hub for many meat-related enterprises, which contributed millions of dollars to the economy for 91 years. Traffic on St. Clair Ave. was sometimes disrupted for five to ten minutes at a time as livestock were lead by a Judas cow or goat from the stockyards across the street to the packinghouses.
Working in a packinghouse was not easy. The kill floor, where carcasses were dressed out after slaughter, was a male domain in which each worker had a precisely delineated task in the physically strenuous process of disassembly. Female employees worked on packing lines for processed meats, such as sausages and bacon, but they too faced heavy lifting, harsh work environments and a fifty-six hour work week until 1942.
In 1944, the Government of Ontario purchased the Union Stock Yards from American interests and renamed it the Ontario Stock Yards. The Ontario Stock Yards became the only government owned public stockyards in Canada.

Related websites
St. Clair Avenue
meat-processing industry

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Industrial Buildings

Here are the visitors' comments for this page.

Posted December 8, 2011
this page is another great piece of history. i can remember going with my grandfather and father to the stockyards for a truck ride i thought it was awesome. i love listening to oldtimers talk about the history of the toronto stockyards and looking at photos of the way it use to be. thanks

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