The Kingan Pork Packing plant in the first picture, a drawing, occupied 27 acres on both sides of the river where the Zoo, Victory Park (a baseball stadium) and the rest of White River State Park are located now. They employed 5,000 (mostly Irish) people and were one of the largest meat packing plants in the world.
In fact, Kingan’s Indianapolis facility was the largest porkhouse on the planet. For this reason, Indianapolis, for many decades, was the world’s largest supplier of meat. This was so because most of the American diet was centered around pork, which could be preserved with salt, unlike beef which needed refrigeration. As such, just like the Crossroads of America preceded Detroit as the Car Capital of the World, Indianapolis also preceded Chicago as the World’s Top Meat Supplier!
It was also at this site in 1868 that George Stockman, an engineer with Kingan & Co., invented the meat locker, a way to refrigerate rooms and buildings (Thomas Kingan filed patent #140,375 in 1873, 18 years before the refrigerated rail car was invented so beef could be kept fresh). It was this that enabled Kingan to be the world’s first year-round meatpacking operation). About this invention, in his 1910 history of greater Indianapolis, historian Jacob P. Dunn, said:
“If Indianapolis wants to put up a monument for a citizen who did more for all the world than all her professional men and statesmen put together, she has the subject in George W. Stockman.”
In adding to the Kingan impact on the American diet, in 1914, Kingan also became the first meatpacker to sell sliced bacon.
The second photo above shows Beveridge Paper which operated there until the mid 1990’s. The skyscraper centered in the background is the One America building with the Perry W smokestack, talked about below, at the right. Beveridge, which took over the Salisbury Vinton Paper Mill in 1862, surrounded the Indianapolis Water Works of 1870 when the Indy Canal ran behind the two buildings. North of the Water Works , in 1908, was Sandstrom Short-Turn Buggy, a short-lived horse drawn carriage maker, and then a small neighborhood where the giant lawn is now. Moving north these locations were followed by the Acme-Evans Flour mill, Brower & Love Cotton Mill and the Indiana Bleaching Company, all now home to the NCAA headquarters, NIFS and the playing fields for IUPUI.
The bridges you see in the first picture (drawing), the ones between the two buildings, are the old Washington St bridge of 1870 (rebuilt in 1902 and 1914) that is now an esplanade that feeds the zoo. To its right, is the covered bridge built in 1834 for the National Road when it arrived here from near Washington, DC, and allowed its travelers to get as far west as Vandalia, Il, 63 miles short of the Mississippi River.
Beveridge Paper & Kingan Pork Packing – sign reads, “Kingan’s Reliable Meats”…. http://images.indianahistory.org/cdm/ref/collection/dc012/id/2887
In the above picture, a Kingan Reliable Meats building can be seen standing next to Beveridge Paper when the Indy Canal drained into the White River behind it. The tall smokestack at the left is Perry W one of Indianapolis Power and Light’s coal powered electric plants. This view changed in 1967 when Detroit-based Hygrade Corp which had bought Kingan in 1952 and kept it open for another 14 years burned down a year after it closed its doors.
Note: Kingan had built ice packing plants in Broad Ripple, ten miles to the north, and brought that ice down to the main plant in the summer. Here, with Stockman’s process, they were able to mix the ice with salt to cool whole rooms. Even though John Gorrie, M.D., was granted the first U. S. Patent (No. 8080) for mechanical refrigeration in 1851 for his invention of the first ice machine, artificial ice, as it was called, was slow to catch on. By the 1890s, however, natural ice became a problem on a national level because of pollution and sewage dumping.
Note 2: Kingan was founded in Belfast, Ireland 1845. Moved to Indianapolis 1862, 5000 employees. Daily capacity of 10,000 hogs, 1500 cattle, 1,000 sheep, 1000 calves
Kingan even got insulin for diabetics from the pancreatic glands of the animals they slaughtered. From the bones they made brush handles, buttons, hairpins and knife handles Hides were made into shoes, gloves and traveling bags. The fats and oils became soap
Mote 3: A 1926 article in the Indianapolis News provided a lot of the facts about Kingan as did this article in Historic Indianapolis. Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps also played a big part.
Note 4: Brigette Cook Jones, Hancock County Tourism Director fleshed out the IPL smokestack as well as the Washington St. bridge that s there now which had been wrongly thought to be a rebuild of the National Rd Bridge of 1834.
Other posts about Indianapolis history Martin Krieg created as he wrote "How Indianapolis Built America" are at this link HERE
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