The great fire of 1963 and the end of meat packing in East Cambridge
By Michael Kuchta, 2025
On the afternoon of April 14, 1963, Easter Sunday, a spectacular fire consumed the Squire’s meatpacking plant on Gore Street in East Cambridge. More than 500 firefighters from Cambridge and surrounding communities worked to subdue the flames. Hot embers were carried by the thick smoke and fell onto buildings as far as a mile away; where possible, residents sprayed their roofs with water from garden hoses. As many as 400 families were evacuated from a seven-block area. The wooden interior structure of the building, The Boston Globe reported, “had been impregnated with grease and oil from the meat processing operations that had been performed there,” fueling the intense fire. Though the blaze was brought under control within hours, the odors lingered for weeks.
Pam Chamberlain, who lived in the area at the time, told History Cambridge, “I think I still had my Easter dress on when my father took me down to watch. Despite the empty factory, the whole of East Cambridge smelled like baked ham, which I now always associate with Easter!” For many area residents, the 1963 fire at Squire’s plant has remained an enduring memory, the dramatic end to a century of meat packing in East Cambridge. The Squire’s site, spanning the boundary between Cambridge and Somerville, now houses the Twin City Plaza shopping center, Simoni Ice Rink, a community health center and surface parking lots, with little evidence of its former industrial use.
How it all started
In 1855, a man named John P. Squire bought land on the Miller’s River in East Cambridge and erected a slaughterhouse for processing swine, initially butchering just one hog a day. The Squire’s site benefited from convenient access to the Grand Junction and Fitchburg railroad lines, connecting it to hog farmers in New England and the Midwest. Squire’s sold its products – including fresh pork, bacon, ham, sausages, pig’s feet and lard – to local meat vendors. The company soon developed an export business, and by the early 1870s, was shipping its goods from Boston to Liverpool, England.
Pigs arrived at the Squire’s plant in East Cambridge on train cars, as many as 120 carloads a day by the 1870s. Once the hogs were slaughtered, the pork products needed to be kept cold to avoid spoilage. Before industrial refrigeration was installed at the plant in the 1890s, the only way to keep the meat cold was with ice cut from local ponds and lakes. Ice from Fresh Pond in Cambridge was often used, but in years when warm winters limited its availability, ice was harvested from ponds as far away as New Hampshire.
The packing plant soon proved to be a public nuisance. Animal fats were boiled and turned into lard or prepared for use in soap making, releasing foul smells. Waste products from the slaughterhouse included pig blood, urine and feces, and the process water used to remove the hair and skin from carcasses. The Squire’s plant dumped these into the Miller’s River, which once ran behind the plant and emptied into the Charles River. Tidal currents were often not strong enough to flush the estuary of the decomposing waste. Cambridge, Somerville and Charlestown residents registered complaints with their local representatives in the early 1870s, objecting to the “disagreeable and sickening odor” of the fat rendering process and the disease potential of the waste.
An East Cambridge citizens committee asked the Massachusetts State Board of Health in September 1873 to close Squire’s and two other meat packing plants. The next year, the board reported: “We know of no territory of equal extent within the borders of Massachusetts in so foul and so dangerous a condition, and none in which so virulent forms of epidemic disease, if once introduced, would be likely to commit such ravages as in the Miller’s River District and its immediate surroundings … In these circumstances it becomes our duty to point out the special dangers which are recognized as existing in this Miller’s River District, situated within two miles of the state house, and in the midst of a dense population.” The state board noted that, among the three packing plants, 800,000 swine were killed in 1873. These were supplemented by “very numerous small establishments where refuse meat is boiled to extract the grease. The odors from all these places, coming from the living swine, the scalding tanks, the boiling of fresh fats, the boiling of dead hogs received by the trains, the boiling of refuse and putrid meats from the markets and restaurants and dwellings [are] carried by the winds to all the neighboring highlands.” Despite these misgivings, the State Board of Health refused to order the plants closed or relocated.
A commission chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature proposed that the cities of Cambridge and Somerville fill in the Miller’s River with gravel and build underground sewer lines to discharge liquid waste directly to the Charles. In 1874, with no hope that the slaughterhouses would be closed by the Board of Health, the cities built sewers and filled in the upper portion of the basin. This solution, combined with improvements in the meatpacking process itself, allowed the Squire’s plant to not only remain in business but to expand its operations.
A dangerous business
Having settled its dispute with state health officials, Squire’s still had to contend with the needs of its workforce. In July 1886, local newspapers reported that laborers at the Squire’s plant had been locked out of their jobs after trying to bargain for better wages. Only 150 of the plant’s 750 employees were working, the Cambridge Chronicle reported, though company owner John P. Squire was optimistic others would return to work eventually at the previous wages and that replacements could be easily found for those who didn’t. The reporter described the typical life of a Squire’s employee: “Slaughtering and dressing 2500 hogs is an average day’s work in the factory. Many of the men lived in tenements owned by Mr. Squire and obtained their provisions from his store, the Miller’s River Market. The rent and provision bill was deducted from the wages, the men receiving the balance, which on some occasions did not amount to over one dollar.” The paper reported that ”Mr. Squire Declares he will nail up his Factory rather than give in.” The impasse continued into August 1886 but was eventually resolved.
Meatpacking could be a dangerous business, involving live animals, grease-coated work surfaces and sharp knives. In November 1890, the Chronicle reported “Last Saturday night a Portuguese named Antonio was caught in the belting of the shafting in Squires and crushed between the bolt and the wheels. The poor fellow was caught up so suddenly that he had hardly time for an exclamation. He died on the way to the hospital. Another man had his leg dislocated by a hog falling on him from the grappling hooks, in the same factory. And still another was cut severely by the hatchet which he was using slipping from his grasp.”
The 1890s were a challenging decade for the company. Newspapers reported another strike at the plant in April. The plant’s 700 workers were represented in negotiations by the Knights of Labor, an early union. They sought a 20 percent pay increase and a six-day workweek, with extra pay for Sundays or nights. Squire refused to negotiate with the union representatives, according to the Chronicle, and rebuffed demands for higher wages.
A fire followed by calm
In October 1891, the plant was consumed by fire. The glow from the flames could be seen across the Charles River in Boston. Fifteen hundred hogs were roasted alive. The fire was fueled by the abundant animal fat in the buildings. When the “grease room” caught fire, according to one report, the neighborhood was filled with the smell of burning lard. People living along Gore and Winter streets began packing up their belongings in fear that the flames would spread to their houses. The fire was eventually brought under control, but areas of the complex continued to smolder for days. The Chronicle reported: “The loss to John P. Squire & Co., is between $125,000 and 150,000 … Albert Currier, who built the factory in 1885, was telegraphed to come from Newburyport at once to begin rebuilding.” It would likely be around $5 million in today’s dollars.
Squire died in 1893, leaving management of the company to his two sons. The Squire family lost control of its business a decade later, the result of a financial crisis that forced it to take on outside investors. By 1930, when Squire’s employed more than 1,000 local people, it had been sold to the Swift meatpacking company of Chicago.
In 1942, the Cambridge Sentinel newspaper reported that 27 Squire’s employees were recognized for 25 years of service to the company. The list of those receiving awards – including the last names Capobiano, Festa, Fitzgerald, Lampedocchio and Nicholeris – reflected the Irish, Italian and Portuguese families and other immigrant groups who had settled in East Cambridge and found work in the slaughterhouses.
In 1945, during World War II, the Squire’s plant was unable to operate at full capacity due to a shortage of hogs, and employees did not receive their usual pay. Two hundred workers from the plant picketed in front of the State House in Boston to express their dissatisfaction with the shortened workweek.
Labor unrest continues
Squire’s workers march on the War Manpower Commission and State House in Boston to seek relief from a workweek shortened by a lack of hogs in 1945.
In March 1948, nearly 1,000 unionized meatpackers in Cambridge and Somerville, 400 of whom were women, went on strike as part of a national effort to demand better wages and working conditions. Overall, 100,000 employees of the five largest meatpackers in the country left their workplaces, cutting U.S. meat production in half and leading to price increases and shortages in some markets. In Cambridge, several workers were reportedly clubbed by police officers attempting to maintain access to the meat plant’s gates. The strike continued into late May, when workers agreed to return to their jobs.
Labor unrest continued to dog the Squire’s operation in the 1950s. In December 1951, the union representing 600 Squire’s employees in Cambridge voted to strike against the plant’s Chicago-based corporate parent after stalled negotiations over wages and union representation.
It’s unclear from published sources exactly when meatpacking operations ceased at the Squire’s plant in East Cambridge. Local grocery stores were still advertising the availability of Squire’s bacon and fresh pork products as late as 1960. Swift’s, the Chicago parent company, applied for permits to demolish parts of the complex in 1958 and 1962, suggesting the end of meat processing. At the time of the fire, the Globe reported that about 70 Swift’s office employees still worked at the complex, managing the company’s meat sales in New England, though the structure was already partly razed. What remained after that Easter Sunday in 1963 were only memories of a big East Cambridge employer and its tasty hams.
Do you have memories of the Easter 1963 fire at the Squire’s meatpacking plant? If so, please leave comments. History Cambridge will hold a History Cafe program May 13 about the history of Squire’s and its impact on labor and environmental law in Cambridge – see our website for information and registration.
This article originally appeared in Cambridge Day.
