Here you see an important industry connected with a great packing house. These machines and these people are all making link sausages. Shoulders and hams of butchered bogs are trimmed and rounded in the finishing departments of the packing house. These trimmings are carefully saved. Ears, tails, cheeks, snouts—all are cleaned and made ready for the sausage department. All these trimmings and pieces are cleaned, put into vats, and taken to the sausage-making room. In this room they are put into huge grinders or meat choppers which work after the fashion of the meat chopper your mother has in her kitchen. In the room here shown there are 74 of these chopping machines, each one of which can turn out daily 9,000 pounds of chopped meat. This means that 384 tons of sausage meat can be made every day in this one room. The chopped meat falls into large boxes.

Spices and flavorings are added, and the sausage is thoroughly mixed. The boxes then are wheeled beside the stuffing machines that you see on your right. The stuffers are only huge compresses. A plunger is pushed down by compressed air or by steam from the box above. The sausage is in the lower part of the macihine. The cleaned intestines of the hogs are used as sausage casings. These are slipped over the funnels opening from the compresses. Under pressure, the sausage is driven into the casings at the rate of 10 feet per second. That is one, one of these machines can stuff 7 miles of suasuge in a hour. These cases are tied in links at given distancs apart and then are taken to the refrigerator room. Here they are packed for shipment, and sent to retail dealers all over the country.