Qualla: Foreign Cattle Market

Foreign Cattle Market: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit C.R.B. Barrett, Public domain. Cowboys rounded them up on the high plains of Montana and Wyoming. Drovers walked them onto trains. The trains delivered them to ports — Boston, Baltimore, Galveston — where they were loaded onto cattle steamers. Two weeks across the Atlantic, in conditions that killed thousands per crossing, then up the Thames, then down a gangway onto a quay that had been built by Henry VIII in 1513. They had ten days to live. Between 1872 and 1913, sixteen and a half million animals walked that gangway at the Foreign Cattle Market in Deptford, a quarantine slaughterhouse on the site of the old royal dockyard. None of them left alive.

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Image: C.R.B. Barrett | Public domain

Foreign Cattle Market: Smithfield Was Too Small

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown caricaturist, Public domain. For centuries London's cattle market had been held at Smithfield, where butchers bought animals and slaughtered them on the spot. The Victorian city's growth made this impossible. Drovers were herding cattle up Oxford Street in 1850. The smell was unbearable, the public health ri...

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Image: Unknown caricaturist | Public domain

Foreign Cattle Market: The 1865 Plague

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit "Messrs. Tuson and Burgess", Public domain. Free trade in cattle, enabled by Robert Peel's 1842-46 reforms, allowed European livestock to flood British markets. As the rail network reached into Russia, cattle came from the steppes. Russia had never been free of rinderpest, the cattle plague — a viral disease almost univers...

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Image: "Messrs. Tuson and Burgess" | Public domain

Foreign Cattle Market: Deptford Chosen

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. The 1869 Contagious Diseases (Animals) Act required the City of London to open a second metropolitan market exclusively for imported animals, to operate under strict quarantine, with no animal allowed to leave alive. It needed a port site with deep water and lots of space. The de...

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Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Foreign Cattle Market: The Cattle Came From Everywhere

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gordon Campbell (a/c to 'Australasian Pastoralists' Review', April 17 1895, p.77), Public domain. Initially the trade was European: Western Europe, Austria-Hungary, the Russian steppe. Then the transatlantic trade exploded. By 1880 most of the cattle slaughtered at Deptford had been rounded up by cowboys on the Great Plains. The volume was large enough to shape the American a...

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Image: Gordon Campbell (a/c to 'Australasian Pastoralists' Review', April 17 1895, p.77) | Public domain

Foreign Cattle Market: The Animals and the Work

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unidentified cartoonist, Public domain. The journey was brutal. Most animals had endured long railway journeys before they were loaded; severe methods were used on trains and ships to force recumbent animals to stand again, to prevent them being trampled. In stormy weather animals were washed overboard, jettisoned to l...

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Image: Unidentified cartoonist | Public domain

Foreign Cattle Market: The End of the Trade

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Boote, Samuel, Public domain. By the Edwardian era the Chicago meatpackers had figured out how to bypass the auction system entirely, taking advantage of a regulatory loophole. Refrigerated shipping was killing live import. The market closed in 1913. In October 1914 the War Department took over the site as a ...

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Image: Boote, Samuel | Public domain