Junkyard

History of Junkyards

Yards with scrap materials such as copper, iron, or silver have existed as long as markets for those metals. In the American colonies, Paul Revere kept a yard of scrap metal for his work as a metalsmith. The number of such yards, and the name junkyard increased with the Industrial Revolution. Shipbuilders and railroads kept salvage operations on their own sites, and independent yards containing rope, rags, metals, and any other materials desired by industrial producers became common by the end of the 19th century, containing the detritus of farm machinery, household tools and appliances, scrapped vehicles, and retired industrial machinery. A consumption ethic based on [Page 452]style rather than functionality spurred disposal of durable goods in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, increasing the volume and variety of objects found in junkyards.

In the United States, thousands of junkyards—most found in industrialized areas of growing cities—welcomed millions of mass-produced metal goods that could be resold as secondhand appliances or processed as scrap. Many yard owners started as junk peddlers. In the United States, a common path to ownership during the period of growth between the Civil War and World War I was to emigrate from Europe, become a peddler, and with the money raised, rent or purchase land to create a junkyard. Demand for secondary materials fueled the growth of junkyards, especially for materials containing iron and steel. The number of yards listed in city directories in Detroit, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston almost doubled between 1880 and 1921; in Chicago, the total listed in the annual Lakeside Directories increased from 140 in 1890 to 471 in 1917.

The trade in junk became an organized industry during this period, as yard owners created trade publications such as the Waste Trade Journal and professional associations such as the National Association of Waste Material Dealers (NAWMD) and the Institute for Scrap Iron and Steel (ISIS) in the first three decades of the 20th century. These institutions reflected the pervasiveness of yards in modern life and their role in both housing scrapped materials and reintroducing them to industrial production. In the 1920s, the automobile graveyard became a new, specialized junkyard, where customers could purchase obsolete automobiles for scrap or purchase individual parts off junked automobiles in order to repair other automobiles.

Technology

Junkyard technology changed over time. In the early 20th century, workers sorted and processed materials by hand or with small shears or acetylene torches. By the late 1940s, common technology included conveyors, dust-collecting systems, forklifts, hand trucks, rag-cutting machinery, rag shredders, shears of various sizes, torches to reduce items into manageable sizes, balers to turn scrap into symmetrical cubes, cranes and magnets to move heavy materials, and a variety of other tools to process materials. With the mass disposal of the automobile in the 1950s, several yards adopted specialized automobile shredders that disassembled a car within minutes, allowing yard owners to harvest No. 1–grade ferrous scrap. The torches and shears used in yards were too slow to profitably separate steel from the rest of an automobile, but by 1960, machinery designed to quickly harvest scrap metal from automobiles evolved to hammer and shred automobiles, using magnets to separate the ferrous scrap from other materials. The automobile shredder became a staple of the junkyard by the late 1960s, as its ability to hammer down an automobile and quickly separate light iron and steel from the many other materials found in automobiles gave operators the ability to process a massive source of consumer-generated scrap. Larger yards adopted other devices such as balers and cranes to process and transport materials. Smaller yards focused on securing goods. Among the tools to provide security were barbed wire, electrical fences, and intimidating junkyard dogs.

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