Swift, Gustavus Franklin

Born and reared on hardscrabble Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and with little formal education, Swift went to work as a butcher’s apprentice at age fourteen. Not long after, he began his own business, buying cattle, butchering them, and selling the meat door to door. Over the next twenty years, he built a successful wholesale business with James A. Hathaway and operated a modern market in Clinton, Massachusetts. The lessons of frugality and resource management that he learned in these years were the foundations for his future role as America’s “dressed beef king.”