A BIG GAMBLE when it was launched during the Great Depression, Port City Stockyards bucked the odds and still serves the Houston area more than half a century later. And it is still operated by the Sartwelle family, represented here by J.D. Sartwelle, left, and his son, Jim.

J.W. Sartwelle Made His Dream
A Reality With Port City Sale

By Colleen Schreiber

SEALY — The Sartwelle name has long been linked to the ranching industry in the Gulf Coast area of Texas. The late James Williams "J.W." Sartwelle, often described as a visionary, had a lifelong dream to provide Gulf Coast cattlemen with a better way to market their cattle. Despite the fact that the country was gripped by one of the worst depressions in history, the ever-optimistic Sartwelle followed his dream to fruition, establishing a terminal market much like that of the larger Fort Worth and Kansas City markets.

"He was a tremendous man and a darn good businessman," J.D. Sartwelle says of his father.

"He was always optimistic too, even in the dark, dark days of the Great Depression. Here it was 1931, the worst depression the country had ever seen, and my father is trying to sell stock in a new stockyards company. Everyone called him crazy."

Port City Stockyards was a success, however, and by 1947 it was the fourth largest calf market in the U.S., marketing some 400,000 to 450,000 head a year. At one time nine commission men officed there. It was the second market in the U.S. to computerize, with the first computerized sale occurring in 1970.

J.D. is for the most part retired, but his sons J.D. Jr. "Jim" and Bill continue the family business. They operate the livestock market at Sealy as well as the one at Brenham, which they bought in 1972. Today, in an average year, their runs total somewhere around 65,000 to 70,000 head. Still, Sartwelle notes, that’s small potatoes compared to the heydays when it wasn’t unusual to move 450,000 a year.

James Williams’ family originally ranched in the Commanche area. J.W. was educated in the North. After college, he returned to Commanche and went to work for the railroad. Within two years’ time, he was appointed the station manager at Menard. In one year, 1916 or 1917, Sartwelle reportedly loaded more cattle cars than any other station on the Texas and Pacific.

While working there, he became acquainted with a Gulf Coast operation, Ward Land and Cattle Company, one of the larger operators of the time. The company offered the young Sartwelle the chance to become general manager of their outfit. He accepted and moved to San Antonio, where they were headquartered at the time. It was during his tenure with Ward Land and Cattle that Sartwelle and his family became interested in Brahman cattle.

"At that time we were just eaten up with fever ticks. All those people who were trailing their cattle north had all kinds of trouble trying to get through Kansas and Oklahoma because of the fever tick," Sartwelle explains. "Damn near had fist fights and gunfights and everything else because the folks in Kansas didn’t want to be infected."

After the Brahman bloodlines were introduced, Gulf Coast cattlemen discovered that halfblood Brahman steers didn’t have any problems with the tick and could easily be trailed north.

"That was the great value of the Brahman breed in the beginning," Sartwelle says. "That and the fact that they could stand the heat, the mosquitoes and other parasites better than the other cattle."

Back then most South Texas cattle were of the mestizo persuasion, better known as Longhorns.

"Ranchers would be lucky if they had a calf crop worth talking about, lucky if they survived, and it would be a five year-old before it weighed 850 pounds," Sartwelle says. "When the Brahman cattle came in, ranchers got calf crops up to 50 percent right quick and weaning weights up around 400 pounds as opposed to 250 pounds. Heterosis was basically defined when ranchers started crossing the Brahman bull on the mestizo cow and her calf was bigger than she was.

"The Brahman breed revolutionized the cattle business for this part of the world," he continues. "Borrowing the words of my father, the Brahman breed didn’t just survive. They thrived in this part of Texas."

Unfortunately, in 1918, the Ward family went broke and the bankruptcy judge appointed the young Sartwelle receiver of their assets. Instead of selling the cattle in a group, Sartwelle carefully sorted through the Brahman blooded cattle and sold them to Fred C. Locke in Louisiana. Two years later, Locke hired Sartwelle to run his operation. Eventually Locke sold the Brahman herd back to Sartwelle and his brother for their family’s Canmore Ranch in Matagorda and Jackson Counties. That was their entry into the Brahman business.

In 1924, Sartwelle organized the American Brahman Breeders Association. His primary objective was to develop a fine beef animal while retaining the Brahman resistance to heat and insects which enabled it to thrive in the Gulf Coast area.

Much later, the Sartwelles were among the first to ship cattle by air.

"We started out using those little DC3s. All the airline people were scared to death, so we had to build a crate that weighed more than the calf," Sartwelle explains.

Eventually they talked the airlines out of using crates, and instead simply tied the animals.

After the war, they sold seven or eight loads of cattle, horses, sheep and other livestock to Guatemala. The planes were loaded at the Houston airport no later than 3 a.m. so they would arrive in Guatemala before dark.

On the last load, one of the Guatemalan politicians put in an order for the best of everything — the best cattle, the best horses, the best jackasses, "the best everything, because my brother and the president is going to be there, and we’re going to have a grand fiesta when we unload them," he told Sartwelle.

Sartwelle says he tried to explain to the man that it wasn’t a good idea to mix mares, jacks and stallions, for obvious reasons. In the end, sound judgment was overruled. Sartwelle says the biggest mistake yet was that he planned to make that last trip himself. The airline president, a Mr. McGee, planned to go, as he had done on all the other flights, so Sartwelle felt he was in capable hands.

"I was wise enough to ask McGee what happens if this airplane gets in trouble. He said, ‘hell, number one, we always carry a .45, and if something gets out of hand we can kill it. Number two, and the most important, is that all we have to do is take this airplane up to 14,000 feet and the lack of oxygen will knock the animals out.’

"So we get on this airplane with these hot mares, a jackass, two stallions and all sorts of other things, and sure enough we’re out over the Gulf and all hell breaks loose," Sartwelle says. "You could hear that jack and those stallions kicking the side out of this airplane. I was riding up front and this airplane was going crazy. ‘Ol McGee, white as a sheet, turns to the pilot and says, ‘give me the gun.’

"I said, ‘wait a minute. What about this business about taking the plane to 14,000 feet?’ He said, ‘Oh, I forgot. Take it up.’ Just as soon as we hit that altitude it was like a giant hand had knocked all of them in the head. We were able to retie them and go on with the flight.

"Talk about being scared. I was plumb scared. I looked down and all I could see was water and we had a hole in the side of the airplane the size of your head. We did get there, got them unloaded, and we had that grand fiesta."

On Christmas Day of 1924, one of the worst freezes to ever hit the Texas Gulf Coast forced Sartwelle’s father to rethink his position in the livestock business. Sartwelle was just a tot, but he remembers it quite well.

"That ice storm darn near knocked us into bankruptcy," Sartwelle recalls. "We were running about 3000 cows, and we lost about 1200 to the storm. That was a big setback.

"Edgar Hudgins of Hungerford wrote in his book that on Christmas Eve he went to bed with just a sheet to cover him and the windows open because it was hot. When he awoke the next morning, there was snow on the ground. It stayed cold like that for over a week. We haven’t had one like that since, nothing anywhere close to it."

The losses forced J.W. Sartwelle to leave the family operation. He had a passel of mouths to feed, and Houston seemed to offer the most opportunity. He hit the town running. He entered the real estate business and also went to law school at night.

While practicing law, it came to his attention that a slaughter house was for sale southeast of the Houston city limits on Braes Bayou. The closest market for ranchers in the area was Fort Worth, so there was a terrific need for one in the area. Sartwelle fully believed that if this particular property fell into the hands of the right people it could be the beginning of a terminal livestock market for Houston, operated much like the larger Kansas City and Fort Worth markets.

The year, 1931, was not exactly the time when most men would have considered taking on a new business. The Depression was on, after all. A few other men shared the same dream, however, and they listened when Sartwelle presented the idea.

Two corporations were organized at the same time – the Port City Stockyards Company and the Port City Packing Company. Sartwelle was named president and general manager. The stockyards, which was right in downtown Houston, across from what is today the University of Houston, opened for business on March 16, 1931.

Sartwelle wasn’t through, however. He called a meeting to talk about organizing a livestock show. Livestock quality was poor back then, and Sartwelle reasoned that having a stock show would encourage young kids to demonstrate better breeding and feeding.

"He thought that maybe some of these old hardheaded grandfathers would look at their grandkids and say, ‘if they can do it, then I can too.’"

Seven people showed up at that first meeting, and J.W. Sartwelle, who was obviously persuasive, talked them into becoming directors. The first five or six years those seven founding fathers put up all the money to pay off the debts.

Sartwelle, who was 11, remembers the first year. He didn’t get to show, he says, because he was too busy pitching hay and hauling manure. A sum total of 2000 people attended.

It was an uphill fight for a long time, but their persistence paid off. Today the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo is the largest stock show in the world, and it has given away more money and scholarships than any other outfit in history.

As time went on, Port City became a city within a city. Four packing houses were established around the stockyards, as well as a hide house, soap plant and a dog food plant. It was, Sartwelle says, a small Chicago.

The packing houses weren’t large by today’s standards. Most killed some 50 to 300 head a day. The four at Port City were primarily calf killers. Then, heifer calves were marketed as slaughter calves and were designated by USDA as such. They might dress 200 to 300 pounds.

Born in 1921, J.D. was the oldest of seven children. The livestock business, he says, is all he ever knew or really wanted to know.

"I was educated at the feet of J.W. Sartwelle. It was the University of J.W." he says. Some of the most important lessons he learned from his father, he says, were "a faith in God and a faith in my fellow man."

The young Sartwelle, who had run off and gotten married at the age of 16, spent a few months at the Houston business college until the boss (his father) said he should come home.

He started at the packing plant making $65 a month. "Thank God I married a girl who had a rich father," Sartwelle remarks.

Sartwelle says he learned the business from the ground up. He did everything there was to do at a packing plant. He worked on the kill floor, in the rendering plant, the sausage plant, etc., but the hide house, he says, was his forte.

At that time, the hide was the most important by-product, and the young Sartwelle was responsible for arguing the inspector out of marking too many No. 2 or No. 3 hides.

"It was a good education. I learned a lot in that packing plant, but mostly I learned that it took a lot of hard work and many, many hours."

As times changed, the industry gradually changed as well. Large commercial feedlots first sprang up out West in California and Arizona, and later in the Texas Panhandle. The feeding industry, which allowed for a year-round supply of cattle, replaced the seasonal "slaughter calf" market. Many a calf left the Houston stockyards for a western destination, Sartwelle says.

The packing industry was changing as well. Boxed beef eventually replaced the hanging carcass trade and the smaller family-owned butcher shops, and 100 head kill operations were all but forced out and replaced by the large corporate packers, which today consist of the big four, IBP, Excel, Monfort and National Beef.

Houston was changing as well, "growing like a weed," Sartwelle says. Thus in 1968, when the state wanted to bring a new freeway through the Port City property, rather than battle it out, the family made a trade and moved their operations to Sealy.

Sartwelle says he believes the move from Houston was a good one.

"Basically, we served the cow-calf operator, and it was getting harder and harder to get the smaller operator to haul two to five calves to Houston," he notes. "If we had stayed, the traffic would have eventually choked us out."

Today Port City Stockyards continues its longstanding traditions, but on a much smaller scale — primarily, Sartwelle says, because most of the big ranches on the Gulf Coast are gone. Urbanization, more than anything else, has taken up the open spaces. Sartwelle views it as "the way of the world, a natural progression."

Competition has also increased among the auctions themselves, to the point where Sartwelle says there is one on every crossroads along the Gulf Coast.

"Don’t get me wrong," he adds." Competition is good, but it sure does hurt sometimes," he says. "It just divides the pie, which is a lot smaller, and we used to not have to divide that pie."

Sartwelle says the operation has seen a slew of tough years, so many "that it’s difficult to pick out one in particular."

Still, a few incidents stand out. Once, two producers were told by their commission man at the stockyards that their cattle brought so little it wasn’t enough to cover the freight bill.

"That represented four cow loads of cattle," Sartwelle recalls. "Those two grown men had tears coming down their cheeks. That will stay with me as long as I live.

"This year has been tough," he continues. "The last four or five have been tough, really, but I don’t think they’ve been worse than the 1970s."

Lack of profitability is one of the toughest challenges facing the beef industry, the cowman in particular, Sartwelle says. He doesn’t buy into the alliances and vertically integrated operations which are springing up all over the U.S.

"The beef industry is trying to make itself work just like the chicken and pork industries, and that’s wrong. It’s wrong," he insists, "because beef can’t be raised in houses like chickens and hogs. It’s a totally different environment.

"It’s wrong for this industry to turn its product over to the packer, who might only own the product two days, or to a feeder who owns it five or six months, when we have landowners and cowmen whose whole lives have been involved with raising that product," he continues.

"It’s not right. You’ve got to have competition and you have to give these good people a chance to make a living and a good return on their investment."

Another significant change in the beef industry, Sartwelle says, is the concentration of the packing industry. His father was right in the middle of the first antitrust lawsuit in 1921. The result of that lawsuit, Sartwelle says, ultimately gave his father the opportunity to organize the new market in Houston. He firmly believes that the stage is set for another antitrust situation today.

The beef industry, which he’s been in his entire life, is today "a different ball game," but Sartwelle continues to believe wholeheartedly in the future of his industry.

Like his father and his grandfather before him, Sartwelle says what he’s tried to pass to his own children was a good work ethic, honesty and "faith in the good Lord."

What he loves most about the cattle business, he says, is the people.

"They’re the greatest people on earth, and they’re basically the same people whether they’re from South America, Africa, Australia or the U.S. A cowman is a cowman. It’s a great fraternity."