Having earlier posted a piece on the Cambridge Cattle Market in North Cambridge for National Cow Day, we can’t resist writing this piece about a hog market at the opposite end of town, in East Cambridge, on National Bacon Day.
On Monday night October 5, 1891, Cantabrigians all over town could probably have smelled bacon cooking. It was the occasion of a gigantic fire at the J. P. Squire & Co. pork processing plant.
1,500 hogs perished in the blaze, which started in the hog house. Though it was thought to have been started by sparks from a passing locomotive, no cause was ever firmly established. The fire also demolished the refrigerator building where the hogs were slaughtered and dressed. The main building of the complex survived.
JOHN P. SQUIRE (1819-1893)
John Peter Squire, known as “the pioneer of the pork industry,” was born in Windsor Co., Vermont in 1819. In 1838 at the age of 19, he arrived in Boston and began working at the Faneuil Hall Market for Nathan Robbins, a poultry dealer from Arlington, Mass.
In 1842, Squire started his own firm, Russell & Squire, with partner Francis Russell. The pair continued as general provisions dealers at Faneuil Hall. When that partnership dissolved, Squire kept the business going on his own. Thirteen years later in 1855, he took on two new partners, Hiland Lockwood and Edward D. Kimball, to form the John. P. Squire & Co. Kimball had also been born in Windsor, VT or across the river in Cornish, NH. While still operating at the Faneuil Hall Market, the business expanded from general provisions to specialize in slaughtering and dressing hogs.
That same year, Squire bought the land in East Cambridge between Gore Street and the Miller’s River and built the J. P. Squire & Co. meat packing and processing plant. The plant ultimately covered 22 acres on either side of the Cambridge/Somerville line.
In 1842, Squire’s operation processed one hog a day. By 1872-73, 394,000 hogs per annum were dispatched at the plant. In 1881, Squire built a large refrigerator with four cooling floors, which could hold 30,000 tons of ice, enabling him to increase production. By 1890, having weathered an employee strike, the plant employed 1,000 men and slaughtered approximately 5,000 hogs per day. The ice house could accommodate 42,000 tons of product. So many of the company’s employees were immigrants that the firm provided English lessons during lunch hours. Squire’s business that year was $15,000,000. It was ranked third in the world of the pork packing businesses. [i]
The company suffered nearly fatal damage in a fire in 1891. Squire rebuilt it on a grander scale—the plant went through 300 tons of ice daily and had room to hang 10,000 hogs.
WHERE DID ALL THOSE PIGS COME FROM?
Rather than get his hogs from the local abattoirs in Brighton, Squire imported them from the Midwest, delivered to the plant via the Grand Junction Fitchburg Railroads. The Fitchburg railroad also shipped hogs to the “Cattle Market” at Porter Station in North Cambridge. After arriving at the plant on Gore Street, the hogs were housed in sheds until they were processed. By the mid 1870’s, the company was importing 60-120 Carloads of hogs per week. [ii]
POLLUTION: PEE-YEW!
Squire’s plant was not the only meatpacking business in the vicinity. Others in Cambridge were Nash, Spaulding & Co., Charles H. North & Co., and Joseph Boynton, with seven more upstream in Somerville.[iii] The amount of blood and offal produced by the slaughterhouses of these three companies was vast. Some of Squire’s offal was processed into fertilizer, but most of it, like the others, was dumped into the Miller’s River, leading to a variety of “pestiferous exhalations”:
“…When they slaughtered [the pigs], what an odor! It all depended on where the wind was blowing. We would say, ‘Oh, they’re killing the poor pigs’’ In those days we didn’[t know enough to complain to the city about the smell.”
—Jennie and Helen Iantosca”[iv]
The situation led to the Board of Selectman in Somerville and the Board of Health in Cambridge to call for hearings to remove the “lard factories and slaughter houses” in the area. Arguments about various solutions went back and forth for several years. Squire himself paid for the construction of a sewer through the Miller River channel, for which he was later reimbursed. Somerville, Cambridge, and the Massachusetts Board of Health finally decided that the best solution, in addition to the sewer, was to drain and fill in the Miller’s River basins.
FIRES
Squire’s plant suffered through no fewer than five significant fires: in 1878, 1891, 1893, 1963, and one hundred years after the first fire, in 1978. The 1891 fire was the most significant during the lifetime of the business. The fire of April 1963, one of the largest of fires in the history of Cambridge, broke out in the then-abandoned factory whose floors were saturated with flammable grease and lard. More than 300 firemen from surrounding communities battled the blaze for five hours before it was brought under control.
Left: billows of smoke pour from the John P. Squire Co. meat packing plant, as fireman battle to bring the blaze under control, (14 April 1963); Right: aftermath (16 April 1983). Cambridge Photo Morgue Collection, Cambridge Historical Commission.
PRIVATE LIFE
In 1843, Squire married Kate Green Orvis (1821-1901), the daughter of Gad Orvis, Squire’s first employer in Vermont in 1836. In 1848, the couple moved to Arlington (then West Cambridge) where they lived and raised their eleven children. John Peter Squire died in 1893. His home in Arlington, at #226 Massachusetts Avenue, still stands.
After Squire’s death, management of the company devolved to his two sons, Frank O. and Fred F. Squire. In the mid-1930’s, Swift Co. (based in Chicago) bought the company and ran it until it closed in the mid-1950s.
J. P. Squire & Co. was an influential presence in the community of East Cambridge for over 100 years. Not only for the size of the physical plant and its odiferous-ness, but because they employed 1,000 local people. In 1867, the company built “Squire’s Court,” a complex of 19 housing units between Lambert and 7th Streets, for rental by their employees. [v]
Their clock tower, built in 1873, was an iconic landmark in town:
“Everybody who wanted a job worked at Squire’s, and they had to wear a white hat, coat, and apron. The men had to be there by 7:00 AM. …I worked in the cafeteria…They had a sliding window from the kitchen to this beautiful dining room for the bigshots…Twelve or fourteen bucks a week, that’s all they paid. The best waitresses in the cafeteria got sixteen dollars.”
—Mabel Mokaba Ruffing[vi]
THE LAST HURRAH: 1978
Even after the gigantic fire of 1963, one vacant, five story brick warehouse was left standing.
On September 1, 1978 it too went up in a blaze.
SOURCES
All in the Same Boat: Twentieth-Century Stories of East Cambridge, by Sarah Boyer, Cambridge Historical Commission
History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men. Comp. Under the supervision of D. Hamilton Hurd. (1890).
Cambridge Historical Commission
Cambridge Historical Society: https://historycambridge.org/industry/jpsquire.html
Cambridge Public Library historical newspaper database
Genealogybank.com
Newspapers.com
East Cambridge by Susan E. Maycock. The MIT Press, 1986.
“Tracking Progress: How Somerville Yards — Rail, Stock and Brick — Have Shaped Union Square” Walking Tour researched & led by Ed Gordon, President of the Victorian Society in America, New England Chapter Sunday, September 25, 2016 Co-sponsored by the Somerville Arts Council and the Somerville Historic Preservation Commission.
[i] History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers and Prominent Men. Compiled under the supervision of D. Hamilton Hurd. (1890
[ii] Cambridge Chronicle December 5, 1874
[iii] East Cambridge by Susan E. Maycock (The MIT Press, 1986).
[iv] All in the Same Boat: Twentieth-Century Stories of East Cambridge, by Sarah Boyer, Cambridge Historical Commission
[v] Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge: East Cambridge. Revised edition by Susan E. Maycock.
[vi] All in the Same Boat: Twentieth-Century Stories of East Cambridge, by Sarah Boyer, Cambridge Historical Commission
