Effort underway to save Sinclair plant’s history

CEDAR RAPIDS - Demolition crews took down the closed, flood-and-fire-damaged Sinclair meatpacking plant south of downtown in 2010, and an effort to save the plant's history is underway.

Representatives of the city, the city's Historic Preservation Commission and Brucemore from 2 to 7 p.m. Tuesday invited the public to bring in old photographs and memorabilia related to the packing plant, which opened in 1871 and carried the name of Sinclair, Wilson and Farmstead Foods before shutting its doors March 8, 1990.

What is brought in is being photographed to become part of a digital historical collection of the meatpacking plant's life so the public and historians can access it on city and Brucemore websites.

Jessica Peel-Austin, manager of interpretation and collections at Brucemore, said among the more intriguing items to come through the door Tuesday were blueprints from the plant's smokestack, which came down in the demolition after a fight from preservationists and after the City Council determined it would be too costly to save.

'When the smokestack was torn down, people were unhappy,” Peel-Austin said. 'But this is a way to preserve that history. It's collecting the memories that surrounded that even though it isn't physically there anymore.”

Peel-Austin said preserving the Sinclair plant's history matters because it played a part in the lives of so many Cedar Rapids-area residents. In addition, the historical collection will allow historians to understand where the plant fits into the history of food production, she said.

Cedar Rapids attorney Jim Piersall brought in the blueprints for the plant's smokestack as well as blueprints for how the train tracks ran through the property.

Piersall bought the closed plant in the 1990s and operated pieces of it as a warehouse and a space for small businesses before selling it to the city in January 2007, which owned it at the time of the Flood of 2008.

'It touched a lot of people,” Piersall said of the plant. 'No, I never worked there. But I have some close friends who did. It was a hard job.”

Seventy-six-year-old Beverly Mumm attended Tuesday's event and brought in a photo of Sidney Sinclair, brother of T.M. Sinclair, who opened the plant in the 1800s. Her great aunt was a schoolteacher and good friend of Sidney Sinclair, and his photo has been passed down in the family since 1892, she said.

Mark Stoffer Hunter, a Cedar Rapids historian and a member of the city's Historic Preservation Commission, told Mumm that Sidney Sinclair was active in the management of the meatpacking plant and was, like others in the family, a supporter of Coe College and the YMCA.

Stoffer Hunter said the Sinclair plant's opening in 1871 was 'extremely critical” to the development of the city's industrial base and its Czech and Slovak population.

In its day, he said, the Sinclair plant was among the largest in the nation and world and put Cedar Rapids on the national and international map.

Eight of the buildings or structures at the Sinclair plant including the smokestack were eligible for the National Register of Historic Places at the time of the demolition. The project to digitize the plant's history is part of an agreement among the city, the state and federal government, and is required because federal disaster funds helped pay to demolish the plant.