Vacant Lot Was Once Site of Dixon's Largest Employer

 The cattle and sheep business was once a major part of Dixon's economy – particularly the slaughterhouse business. Some of the business remains, but only outside the city limits.

Around 100 years ago, trains brought cattle and sheep to Dixon, and they were unloaded into pens in the vicinity of the present-day tall grain elevators just to the west of First Street and to the east of the old Methodist church. As needed, they were then herded alongside the railroad tracks to Dixon's prosperous slaughterhouse run by the Mace family. Occasionally a steer would break lose and head downtown along First Street.

The Mace slaughterhouse, which grew from a small operation into Dixon's largest employer, was located across First Street from the present-day Hometown Market. When first started in 1918, it was on the outskirts of town. All that remains there today is a large empty field, with a landscape materials business located just to the south, and a car wash to the north.

C. Bruce Mace came to California from Utah. He first worked at a butcher shop in Winters before setting up his own meat store in Dixon. In those days, in the early 1900s, butcher shops generally butchered whole animals in-house. Later, Mace bought the former Hutton Dairy, with its refrigerated room, and turned it into a slaughterhouse at the site mentioned above. Then, in 1919, he brought in his brothers Alden "Slim" Mace and Calvin Mace (Mace Boulevard in Davis is named after the family). Their first operations involved dispatching and butchering five cattle per day, and 20 lambs per day during the lamb killing season.

Eventually, as the operations grew, the Southern Pacific Railroad maintained corrals next to its tracks, just to the east of the slaughterhouse. The Mace company itself built corrals and a feed lot adjacent to the railroad's, ending the need to herd cattle a quarter mile and across First Street.

In the early 1930s, cattle sold for as little as three cents a pound or approximately $33 for an entire animal.

A new four-story-high slaughterhouse building was constructed around 1936 where cattle and sheep were led to the top, and killing and butchering proceeded gradually downward, being completed on the ground floor. The meat primarily went to the Sacramento area. Later, after the Bay and Carquinez bridges were built, much of the meat was trucked to San Francisco and production increased.

Things really took off during World War II. Beginning in 1941, to supply the military, the government became the Mace Company's largest customer and ordered that only 15 percent of the meat be supplied to the civilian market (food rationing was in effect).

After the war, things changed. Slaughterhouses in South San Francisco were closing and the Armour Meat Company there was looking for new sources of supply. At first the Mace brothers resisted offers from Armour to buy their slaughterhouse, but eventually sold in 1958, in part because they realized that a slaughterhouse couldn't remain in that location for long as Dixon grew around it. Slaughterhouses can have odor and noise problems.

By this time, the "kill" had reached 2000 lambs and 100 cattle a day.

The last owner of the former Mace slaughterhouse was the Monfort Meat Company of Colorado, which was acquired by the ConAgra company. Competition from non-union meat operations in the Midwest contributed to the demise of the operation in 1989. The land was then acquired by William H. McLaughlin's Dixon Commercial Properties and all of the slaughterhouse buildings and structures were torn down, leaving a vacant field which awaits subdivision and development.

For a number of years, the Mace brothers operation ran alongside a smaller meat company run by the Stoeven brothers one mile south of Dixon's city limits along Highway 133. Later, that business was owned by other parties over the years, and continues to operate today as Superior Farms. It now processes only sheep and is the largest lamb slaughterhouse in California.

The history of the Mace plant indicates that cities should never plan to depend upon their largest businesses forever for employment and tax contributions. Due to changing economic and market conditions, large businesses can come and go.