During the mid-nineteenth century, Cincinnati was the leading pork producer in the United States. Cincinnati’s economic growth and expansion from 1840 to 1860 can be attributed to its successful pork industry.  It is unknown who first used the name to describe Cincinnati’s pork packing empire but it started to appear in print in the 1840s. One article from The Times-Picayune in New Orleans, Louisiana said “Porkopolis- One hundred and sixty thousand hogs have already been slaughtered this year in Cincinnati”, in 1845. By 1840, the name Porkopolis  was an acknowledgment of the booming hog industry, which propelled urbanization and economic growth in the region. On the waterfront of the Ohio River sat various warehouses, ready to process and distribute pork products locally, nationally, and even internationally. As industrialization expanded, the surrounding residential space expanded. 

Porkopolis represents the relationship between agrarian and urban society during the industrial revolution. Hogs were raised on farmland and then brought to the city of Cincinnati, by foot on walks -called “drives” – and by canals. The main form of transportation would shift to the railroads by 1850. These hogs moved through a rapidly expanding Cincinnati to the stockyards and eventually to the slaughterhouses, as manufacturers processed the hogs’ bodies to create various products for consumers. Cincinnati’s rise as the leading pork producer in the United States was established through the complex relationship between urban and rural life.

Hogs were not mass-produced in the early 19th century. As the United States’ economy became more integrated in the 1820s and 1830s, hogs became commodities. Hogs were then brought to one of Cincinnati’s numerous slaughterhouses. Specific technologies turned hogs into various pork products that funded pork packers and merchants which allowed them to accumulate significant wealth and expand their operations. These shifts in technology included; the assembly line, hooks and gambrels, and the lard rendering tank. These technologies changed the industry and, along with it, human-hog interaction, as the hog became a symbol of Cincinnati. 

By the mid-19th century hogs were now explicitly raised for mass distribution to sellers and consumers in distant locations. During this period, farming practices evolved to meet market demands, changing the hog’s physical makeup and behavioral qualities. Farmers strived to get the hogs to a weight of at least two hundred pounds in about twenty months. Hogs were then transported to one of Cincinnati’s numerous slaughterhouses. Here hogs were broken down into various cuts of meat and the by-products would be transformed through the use of new technologies. These various pork products funded the pork aristocracy of wealthy packers and merchants. These technological shifts changed the process of this industry and human-hog interaction, as the hog gained notoriety as a symbol of Cincinnati.