David Rotenstein writes:
 
>I am interested in rendering plants because of their linkage with the meat
>industry.  Has anyone out there tested/excavated a rendering plant
>(especially one in an urban environment)?
 
 
David: Two or three random thoughts, in a slightly different direction.
 
 
Old horsecar horses were retired to the farms of lower Delaware. A major
item of freight on the steamers between here and Philadelphia were the
draft horses, going upstream when young and downstream when decrepit. So
you can expect to see few street railway horses.
 
In the days when animal power was essential to any manufacturing operation,
each moderate to large factory was tied to a hay farm. The need for a hay
farm was a major inhibiting factor that worked against urbanization. In
fact, the dispersal of industry across the landscape was partly for water
power, but more particularly to provide food for man and beast, mostly
beast.
 
Wilmington, Delaware, is probably the best example that has been preserved.
The "chateau country" where the duPont estates are located today was a huge
complex of powder company farms that existed to support the draft animals
even after the railroads came to Delaware. The powder industry was late to
adopt railroad transport of its products. You did not want a spark-spouting
locomotive hauling your gunpowder to the wharf, so the company actually
built its own road to the wharf, around the town of Wilmington (after one
of their powder wagons ignited on the street and blew up the Episcopal
bishop's house).
 
Most larger industrial sites had onsite stables. The brewery in Wilkes
Barre Pennsylvania comes to mind, with the elaborate facade of the stables
incorporated into the magnificent front of the brewery complex.
 
So there really weren't so many urban horses in big nineteenth-century
cities. Yes, a lot of horses were stabled in the city, but the big users
were tied to farms, where the old horses probably were retired.
 
Cow houses were not uncommon in the cities, both private and industrial.
The pictorial press had a field day exposing the evils of urban milk
production, but there were some genteel cow houses as well.
 
Essentially, when you are looking at the urban livestock you are dealing
with two distinct herds. First, there were the big industrial herds
supported by hay farms and  pasturage outside of town. These would be
healthier animals and likely to die in the country. Then there was the herd
that never left town, providing milk and carriage and occasionally meat
inside the urban environment. There were also chickens, goats, and possibly
guineas.
 
Ragpickers would advertise their willingness to buy bones and hides, and of
course horsehide was valued for belting, which was a hot item. Since we
don't find buried cows and horses in our sites, I would guess that somebody
or some thing ate the meat off them, and that the bone and skin buyers took
what could not be eaten. I'm not sure we want to know what happened to most
of the flesh.
 
David, you would not have wanted to live in a nineteenth-century city, but
you and I would find it interesting to the extreme. I spent two seasons
downwind from a rendering plant, which is not an experience I would want to
repeat.  My guess would be that you would look for the rendering plants
downstream and down wind from the populated area.
 
To quote Harrison Ford's line in Mosquito Coast, "Dead things go
downstream, Mama."
 
 
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