What started as a history lesson on the South St. Paul stockyards has become a spirited campaign to preserve a local landmark — brick gates that once guided workers into the Armour meatpacking plant — for students at South St. Paul Middle School.
The gates are among the last vestiges of an industry that defined South St. Paul, once home to the largest stockyards in the world. The last meatpacker shut down in 2008.
In March, Mark Westpfahl began teaching his seventh-grade American studies classes about the stockyards as part of a larger unit on the Progressive Era. He showed them a photo of the gates located at the corner of Armour and Hardman avenues and noted that most other structures from the stockyard days were gone.
Most of his 120 students became engrossed in the idea of saving them. With their teacher's help, they started an online petition that now has attracted nearly 1,200 signatures and spurred a community conversation about preserving them.
"They started to learn that local history is just as important as state and national history — it has meaning to people," said Westpfahl, who has also been sharing the students' project on social media.
The community has noticed the advocacy, said Dakota County Commissioner Joe Atkins, who chatted with two of Westpfahl's students about the gates at a recent event.
"It went from a tiny blip on my radar screen ... to a big giant dot," he said. "I think [the students'] involvement could be the turning point on this issue, which is unusual."
Atkins said he would love to see the gates preserved — his grandfather and uncles worked in the stockyards — but realizes the city owns them and defers to city officials on future decisions.