Linen-era promotional postcard of Swift & Company's Chicago plant and the Union Stock Yards — an aerial view of hundreds of cattle pens stretching to the horizon, the massive "Swift" sign dominating the Packingtown plant buildings behind, a few drovers tiny among the animals below. At its peak the Union Stock Yards processed nine million animals a year and employed tens of thousands; Swift & Company, one of the "Big Four" meatpackers, ran tours of its plant from the 1890s onward, and this card was handed out to visitors at those tours. The back advertises tours every 30 minutes, Monday through Friday. A visitor wrote in pencil across the top: "150 cattle slaughtered per hour" — a fact that lodged itself in someone's mind as they walked through what Upton Sinclair had made notorious in The Jungle thirty-five years earlier.

• Card no.: 1C41-A
• Publisher: Genuine Curteich-Chicago C.T. Photo-Cote
• Status: Unposted