Milward & Oldershaw

The census reports of 1840 and 1850 place Kentucky second among all states in production of swine. The Milward & Oldershaw plant shown here was built in 1848 on the bank of the Licking River between Robbins and Eleventh streets in Covington. For the swine slaughtering season of 1849, which began in October, the firm's two hundred workers handled seven hundred to one thousand hogs per day. A laudatory article in the Covington Journal in October, 1850 state that hogs were driven up an inclined plane to the top of the building, where pens could hold up to seven thousand animals; the packing process moved downward through the building from there. It was claimed to be the largest slaughtering and packing house in the nation, but operated only a few years before being destroyed by fire.

from Martin Schmidt's Kentucky Illustrated: The First Hundred Years, 1992