At Rib Fest, bite into the long history of East Cambridge’s meat industry

The East Cambridge Business Association hosts on Sunday its 16th annual Rib Fest, a community event with music, vendors and, most importantly, ribs from establishments across the city. In partnership with the association, History Cambridge will host a table and a series of story panels chronicling the history of the area’s meat-processing industry, along with the role of the railroads that connected the goods and people of East Cambridge to the surrounding areas and markets across the nation.

Originally salt marshes and mud flats, East Cambridge was a rich resource for Indigenous inhabitants for thousands of years due to its oyster beds. The area was transformed after colonization by a series of strategic developments. After the first English settler, Thomas Graves, came landowners such as Richard Lechmere. It was Revolutionary War financier Andrew Craigie who truly shaped the neighborhood by acquiring land secretly after the war, building a bridge to Boston and establishing a courthouse to spur development. This led to the growth of industries and housing beginning in the early 19th century, including tenements and middle-class homes that together laid the foundation for the East Cambridge we see today.

The development of the railroad greatly affected the people and industries of East Cambridge, as it did for so many cities across the country. Because of the geography of Boston, the first railroads to enter the city from the north approached across the bay separating Lechmere Point from Charlestown. Between the 1830s and the 1850s, seven railroad companies laid tracks across the bay, creating a confusing array as they crisscrossed one another with no overarching plan in place.

The Boston & Lowell Railroad was the first to be completed. It began traveling in 1835 through Somerville, crossing the Miller’s River and ending in East Cambridge. Soon afterward, the Charlestown Branch Railroad began operation, running from the Boston & Lowell line to the wharves in Charlestown across the tidal flats and providing access to deep-water shipping. This branch was extended in 1841 to Fresh Pond, where it was used to transport the products of the brick and ice industries in North Cambridge.

The Boston & Maine Railroad was extended south from Portland in 1844 to cross Charlestown Neck near the Prison Point Bridge. A parallel crossing was built in 1854 by the Eastern Railroad. The 1850s saw the separation of passenger and freight lines, allowing travel to be streamlined and goods to be shipped around the state and the nation more smoothly. The Boston & Lowell Railroad was particularly valuable as a link between the western towns of Middlesex County and its seat in East Cambridge, operating passenger trains between Lowell and Boston up to 15 times a day until the late 1920s, when they were replaced by the street car. The vast network of railways in the area enabled much of the industrial development in East Cambridge, providing transportation of goods made here to markets near and far and allowing workers to move easily between the neighborhood’s factories and their homes elsewhere in Cambridge, as well as in Boston and Charlestown.

One man who was able to profit greatly from the transportation and industrial advances of mid-19th century East Cambridge was John P. Squire, founder of Squire’s Pork Processing. Squire arrived in Boston at 19 and began working in the poultry business. By 1855, he had his own company and built a packing house in East Cambridge where he started slaughtering hogs. His business grew rapidly, becoming the third-largest pork packing company in the United States by 1892. At its peak, the company was the largest employer of immigrants in East Cambridge, hiring thousands of men from various countries for hard, low-paying jobs. The company was eventually bought out; the factory closed and was destroyed by a fire on Easter Sunday in 1963.

In contrast to the pork processing industry, there were no large-scale chicken processing locations in East Cambridge until the mid-1930s. In 1931, a chicken slaughterhouse had applied for a permit to operate in the neighborhood, but was met with staunch opposition by local politicians and the general public, who argued that, in addition to the noise, odors, lice and other nuisances, “the sight of chickens being murdered would set a bad example to children.” The proprietors of this potential slaughterhouse were Jewish, a fact raised repeatedly in newspaper coverage of their attempt to gain a permit – though it is not stated outright that this was a factor in the opposition to allowing them to open, it is notable that no such objections arose when the Somerville Live Poultry Co. opened less than four years later.

A headline in the Cambridge Chronicle in 1935 read, “New Cambridge Industry – Poulterers!” and a feature on Somerville Live Poultry asked, “Do you like your poultry fresh killed? It is the only way to eat it.” By the time it relocated to East Cambridge in 1935, Somerville Live Poultry distributed some 25,000 birds per week, all coming from farms local to Greater Cambridge. The company began doing business under the trade name Mayflower Poultry in 1965, and its distinctive sign with the large yellow chicken and the words “Live Poultry, Fresh Killed” became an icon on Cambridge Street until the slaughterhouse closed and the sign was sold to the East Cambridge Business Association in 2021.

These and many other stories about the neighborhood’s history, growth and development will be on display at Rib Fest, and History Cambridge invites the public to explore the rich context of East Cambridge’s meat industries while tasting offerings from dozens of local restaurants. While rib sampling requires a ticket, the festival itself is free and open to the public.

About History Cambridge

History Cambridge started in 1905 as the Cambridge Historical Society. Today we have a new name and a new mission. We engage with our city to explore how the past influences the present to shape a better future. We recognize that every person in our city knows something about Cambridge’s history, and their knowledge matters. We listen to our community and we live by the ideal that history belongs to everyone. Throughout 2025, we are focusing on the history of East Cambridge. Make history with us at historycambridge.org.

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