Goodbye South St. Paul stockyards

Silence Replaces Bids and Moos at Stockyards in Suburbs

Excerpt:

The stockyards of South St. Paul say goodbye.

The cattle adieu has been years in the planning, but now it is time. No longer can the end be forestalled by milk-and-meat memories of 122 years; by the boast that these trampled grounds once constituted the largest stockyards in the world; by the vital daily ritual of muck-flecked yardmen coaxing muck-flecked cows into the sales barn, where the auctioneer’s sweet serenade only hardens those bovine expressions of uh-oh.

Times have overtaken the stockyards, for reasons too obvious to dispute. Higher costs. Farms lost to suburban sprawl. The increasingly awkward presence of livestock in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, accustomed now to more sophisticated aromas than what wafts from the pens


Comment: For whatever reason, I have to read the NYTimes to get a local story like this (not found in the Star Tribune) (Upon further review ... it was in the East edition!) South St. Paul stockyards are going, going, gone