Reading's short-lived buffalo tannery

For a few years, Reading was tied straight into the western bison-hide market. Reading dates Stillman Parker’s small shop to 1877. It tanned bison hides and made robes. Local investors formed a stock company, built larger shops, and expanded the work.

Reading says the tannery employed about 200 people and made many thousands of robes each year. Its history page and adopted master plan call the plant the largest buffalo tannery in the world. The Hillsdale County Historical Society is more cautious and calls it one of the world’s largest. No independent record keeper appears in the reviewed sources, so the ranking belongs to those local histories.

The larger story is much harder. The National Park Service says the bison trade peaked from 1870 to 1880 as rail lines opened new markets. Market hunters and the U.S. Army killed millions of bison for hides and to break the food base of Plains Indigenous nations. Disease, drought, and pressure from livestock also played roles. Together, those forces brought the bison close to extinction.

Reading’s factory was one customer in that national system, not the lone cause of the collapse. When western hides became scarce, the city says its buffalo-robe work ended. That is the useful connection to remember: a small Hillsdale County factory could depend on events far away, and its brief success came with a cost that fell most heavily on bison and the Native nations whose lives were bound to them.