Pictures of a couple barn interiors, pens and unloading platform, etc. can be found in A few of Q’s Burlington Bulletin in the 1960s when pieces were done by the rr on Montgomery and related items. The BRHS made a disk of the Bulletins and offered it as a fund raiser. We sold out long ago.
A little known, long forgotten historical fact about the Montgomery stock yard was that it was built on the site of a Q owned gravel pit. Without taking the time to reread Q annual reports my memory is this conversion started in 1892/93 as the pits played out. The Q annual reports are in the flicker section of the members only portion of the BRHS site.
One last lead for research is the Montgomery patch site. There is a good article there about the area men who were sheep shearers at the yard .
Leo Phillipp On Dec 3, 2022, at 10:20 PM, Steven Holding <sholding@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
There were drives out the north end of the cattle barns on to Ill 31 The Waste Piles were along a siding that lead over to Armor Dial and the other industry that was built on the old farm grounds. The next barn to the south(west) was the sheep barn and most sheep came in for Monier Sheep Co. They would feed them with corn and alfalfa pellets that was stored in the elevator. Corn from local with pellets from out west came in in C-6's The Railroad unloaded the pellets and had a feed truck with scales to weight out the needed pellets/corn mix.(Calves and cattle were fed baled hay from the haybarn next to the elevator) Next to the Sheep barn between that and the tracks was a sheep shearing barn area. The middle drive came in between the Sheep barn and the Supt. House (old hotel)a wooden three story building heated by hot water from a coal fired boiler in basement. (the laborers would keep the fire going) with the office a brick building close to the tracks. The building had a truck shop in the east end with two rooms to the west the Office and the locker room(both heated with potbelly stoves) The truck shop was unheated. The drive looped around the Supt's House and to the west was a field that had been another Huge barn the B&B tore down in winter of '67. The west(south)most barn was for cattle and leased to Henry Steele who sold fair quality cattle. So cattle would come to either the main unloading area or south if for Henry Steele. Sheep always came to the main platform. Sheep were just DUM. Often you had to go in and throw out half the car load to get them to leave the car. Once in the pens they moved ok. Once you got the livestock unloaded. Weighted. counted and penned. they you when into the office and had to glue a copy of the scale ticket and write the count on the waybills. This gave the inbound weight to figure the weight lost in transit. and the count listing any dead animals which also had to be removed to an area for the rendering truck. We used an old dump truck to move hay from the storage barn to the storage area above the hay racks in the pens for cattle. Feed truck for sheep
Calves mostly moved in fall for sale to farmers to feed out on stalk fields with sheep moving year round as Monier feed them out for truck movement into Chicago to the packing house. Often the inbound cars were either the old wood NP red cars or Gray steel "Pig Palace" cars but never any thing bigger then 50 Ft with most 40 Footers. NP and GN as well as Q from the north with Q, DRGW and UP from the west. We had an old ford 8N with loader to move deads and clean out pens loading the dump truck to the storeage area then used to load the gons which when to the strip mines in Sou. Ill. That should be enough for a while Steve in SC
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