Background
Jacob Dold was born on June 25, 1825 in Tuttlingen, Wiirtemberg, Germany, where his family had been for generations in the meat business.
Jacob Dold was born on June 25, 1825 in Tuttlingen, Wiirtemberg, Germany, where his family had been for generations in the meat business.
At ten years of age Dold was helping his father, John Jacob Dold, in slaughtering and in sausage making; afterward he became apprenticed to the largest butcher in his native town.
At sixteen he was given the duties of stock buying.
At nineteen he came to the United States and settled in Buffalo, where for two or three years he worked as a butcher for Joshua Barnes, receiving $15 a month and his board.
In 1848 he entered business for himself with his savings, at first making sausages in small quantities and peddling them from house to house with a basket on his arm. His trade soon increased to such an extent that he was obliged to buy a horse.
In 1852 he built his first slaughter-house, which had a capacity of ten hogs a day. His sausages became well known.
With the Civil War, the food resources of the North were taxed to support the needs of the army. Dold received government contracts which gave his business its first real impetus and from that time on his progress was phenomenal.
In 1873 he bought ten acres of ground near the Buffalo stock-yards and erected an abattoir which was the nucleus of the present plant.
He erected a plant at Kansas City, Missouri, in 1880 and five years later, one at Wichita, Kansas.
Dold started a small beef and pork packing plant at the Elk Street Market, putting up a building combining a meat market, dwelling rooms, and an abattoir. He incorporated his business into a stock company of which he continued to be the active head for the rest of his life. By 1909 his three plants were killing a million head of live stock annually.
On the day of his funeral his family learned for the first time that Dold had supplied the funds to build the German Lutheran church which he attended.
By energy, enterprise, and economy Dold acquired an extensive trade. He was an unostentatious, kindly man, addicted to anonymous charity.
In 1850, or thereabout, Dold married Elizabeth Schiesz, and after her death, which occurred in Buffalo some thirty years later, he was married again, to Bertha Bettock who survived him.
He was succeeded in his business by his son, Jacob C. Dold, as able a man as his father.
