Farris and Company Slaughterhouse

History of Farris and Company

Farris and Company was one of Jacksonville’s most significant early-20th-century meatpacking enterprises, a reminder that, unlike many Florida cities, Jacksonville’s rise was powered not only by tourism but by rail-served manufacturing and distribution. The firm was founded by Najeeb Easa Farris, a Syrian immigrant who, by 1910, had opened a family dry-goods store at 410 Davis Street in LaVilla, a neighborhood with a strong Middle Eastern merchant presence.

A decade later, recognizing the opportunity created by nearby stockyards and superb rail access west of downtown, Farris pivoted from retail to wholesale meats and formally incorporated Farris and Company in 1921. Officers of the corporation included Najeeb Easa Farris, president; Richard E. Farris, vice president; Ralph Abraham Farris, secretary-treasurer; and Campbell Farris, one of the directors.

The West Beaver Street Slaughterhouse

To execute the expansion, Farris hired the C.L. Brooks Engineering Company of Moultrie, Georgia, specialists in packing houses and cold-storage plants, to design a modern slaughterhouse with a daily capacity of roughly 100 cattle and several hundred hogs. Construction took place between 1921 and 1922 at what became 2116 West Beaver Street, just east of the National Stockyards and near the tangle of rail lines known as Honeymoon Yard.

Built for an estimated $50,000, the original four-story, fire-resistant plant followed contemporary slaughterhouse best practices, constructed of brick and tile walls, reinforced concrete floors, and a reinforced concrete roof. Rail spurs entered from the west for livestock delivery; the “dirty side” of the operation, the receiving pens and animal incline to upper processing floors, was placed to the rear, while the Beaver Street frontage functioned as the “clean side,” where refrigerated meats departed by truck.

Sanborn maps from 1925 and surviving plan sheets show a purpose-built industrial interior. Live animals were driven up to the third floor, where slaughter and initial processing occurred; the first floor concentrated on cold storage and shipping, as well as lard manufacturing, hide storage, a smokehouse, offices, and the engine room. The plant’s design emphasized durability and hygiene over ornament: a stark, anonymous envelope set back from the street, with early windows later infilled as operations evolved, a vernacular slaughterhouse rather than an architectural showpiece.

Business Operations

Business was brisk enough that Farris and Company expanded repeatedly between 1934 and 1948, culminating in a large three-story reinforced-concrete addition on the east side completed in 1949. During these decades, the firm produced a wide range of staples for regional grocers such as neck-bones, beef liver, pig tails, bologna, ribs, white bacon, and the locally marketed “Florida smoke bacon.”

One of the examples used to showcase the company’s capacity and expertise was its business in 1933, when it slaughtered 60,000 cattle for the U.S. Government. Approximately 700 cattle were processed per day and shipped to government-operated canning facilities around the state. The company kept high standards, being the only meat processing plant in the city with regular federal inspections, with Farris asserting that the city’s inspections were “a joke,” leading Jacksonville to become a “dumping ground” for “bootleg meat.” The company pushed for stricter regulations, but was ultimately shot down due to critics’ claims that the company had ulterior motives for a monopoly on the meat business.

The company operated a fleet of refrigerated trucks that, paired with traveling salesmen, allowed Farris to take orders on one run and fulfill prior orders on the next, with meat transferred directly into merchants’ refrigerators, minimizing time out of cold storage and outcompeting traditional express shipments that were prone to spoilage and contamination. In 1934, a case went to the Supreme Court after Emmett Farris and Robert Smith were arrested in Lake City on charges of violating the city’s ordinance, which required a license for trucks used to transport goods to stores or warehouses from other places. The Supreme Court deemed the ordinance unconstitutional, and the case was dismissed.

Disaster, Loss, and Closure of the Company

Disaster struck in the late 1950s when a burglary attempt led to a fire that destroyed the plant’s offices and much of the interior, ruining stored product. The building itself, constructed of fire-resistant material, survived. The company, then led by Emmett Farris, suddenly could not fulfill contracts with national brands such as Armour and Hormel. The immediate operational and financial loss proved fatal, forcing Farris & Company to close in 1958 after nearly four decades in business.

The Building’s Later Years

The hulking complex did not vanish with the business. For a time after the closure, the property was repurposed as a cold-storage warehouse by the N.G. Wade Investment Company, maintaining its refrigeration-heavy, logistics-oriented function even as slaughtering ceased. In the long post-industrial downslope of the inner city after World War II, when many of Jacksonville’s factories and yards thinned out or moved, Farris’s concrete shell endured as a relic on Beaver Street.

Farris and Company’s early history also reflects the intertwined histories and stories of Jacksonville’s immigrant communities and its industrial base. Syrian and Lebanese entrepreneurs, grocers, sausage makers, and packers figured prominently in the city’s food economy. Rizk A. Farris, brother to Emmett Farris, would go back to his family’s roots, opening Farris Market in 1939 at 2308 Phoenix Avenue in the Springfield neighborhood of Jacksonville.

The slaughterhouse itself became one of several meatpacking companies in the Rail Yard District (others included Jones-Chambliss, Henry’s Hickory House, and Armour & Company), leveraging Jacksonville’s position as Florida’s early rail and port powerhouse. Since 2001, the site has served as the home base of Lockwood Quality Demolition, and the slaughterhouse’s stark geometry still looms over the rail corridor as a physical memory of the city’s manufacturing era.

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