24 NEBRASKA CATTLEMAN April/May 2024 BOOMTOWN There was a time, Bob Gerlach remembers, when Omaha was the center of the livestock industry, and all the country’s best cattle, hogs and sheep streamed in on trucks and trains to its stockyards. Gerlach, whose home is near Hallam, once raised cattle and hogs and farmed the fertile land of eastern Nebraska. Now retired, he recalls a golden time in his life when he owned an International truck with an 18-foot box on it, and, in the evenings when the farm work was done, he’d haul livestock into the city for friends, neighbors and clients. Gerlach’s wife, Bernice, and their kids would often tag along, squeezed shoulder to shoulder on the truck’s bench seat with one of the kids sitting on Bernice’s lap. When the kids got tired, they’d sleep on the floor. It was the 1950s and ʻ60s. It was a good way to live, a great way to raise a family, and there was no better way to see the world than through the windshield of a big truck. PAST “We’d always stop at the McDonald’s near the stockyards for 49-cent hamburgers,” Gerlach recalls. “The kids loved that.” What Gerlach remembers most, however, was the bustling nature of the sprawling complex – the checkerboard pattern of the wooden pens, the drovers and workers moving quickly and efficiently up and down the alleys, and the sorting of newly arrived livestock into commission company pens. On the street nearby, long lines of straight trucks idled patiently in the queue to unload every kind of cow and pig imaginable – dairy cows and bulls, finished steers, groups of weaned calves, baby calves and pigs. While folks waited, they leaned up against their trucks, shared stories, gossiped a little and renewed old friendships. Indeed, during its 100-plus years of operations, the stockyards became a cultural and economic centerpiece, a city in and of itself. Resting on a gentle slope on the south side of Omaha, it became the largest meat-packing center in the world, and at one time the companies associated with the yards employed more than half of the workers in the city. But all of that is over now. Except for the 11-story Livestock Exchange BuildRanchers and farmers shipped livestock to Omaha from all across the West and, by 1955, Omaha supplanted Chicago as the world’s largest livestock market and meatpacking center. Photos courtesy of the Nebraska State Historical Society.
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