Swift and Company headquartered in Fort Worth, was a major branch of the nation’s leading 19th century meat-packing firm and one of the Big Four meat-packers of the early 1900’s. The company was founded in Chicago in the 1880’s by Gustavus Franklin Swift, inventor of the refrigerated railway car. Swifts technological innovation enabled his company to deliver fresh meat from meat-packing centers in the Midwest to large urban markets in the Northeast. Swifts opened their meat-packing plant in the Fort Worth Stockyards in 1903.