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John Morrell Plant Sioux Falls, SD
I'm writing this description more than ten years after my last visit to the John Morrell plant. Finding my memories a little more fuzzy than I thought they'd be. But I believe this building was home ham processing, and lunchmeat production.

The building to the left was home to hot dog production among other things, and the white building in the front was a plant shipping dock. When I started at Morrell, they were just opening a new distribution center which is located to the right of this picture. Morrell shipped more than one hundred trucks per day.

Two interesting notes regarding the building to the left. The five chimneys on the roof were the exhaust to vertical smoke ovens. Meet would be loaded into the ovens inside the building on chains that ran from ceiling to basement. Once loaded, smoke would be filtered into the chamber and the meat rotated on the chains. This was never in operation while I was there, and the description of how it worked is what I recall from stories at the plant.

The second item is a little harder to see, but the white building and the first section of the brick building (you see a lot of mismatched colored brick where building were added on to over the years) are on a curve. That is because the rail siding curves around the building to loading docks between the two buildings. There are bridges between the two building that draw up out of the way to clear the tracks for rail crews switching the plant. Now that would be a neat feature to model.
 
Location: Sioux Falls, SD Date: 10/1/2005
Source: -David Lamb Personal Collection  | (http://www.dlamb15.com/wo/)
Photo ID: 2889
Categories: Morrell Meats |  Industries | 
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