Finance History | CME Group — The Board of Trade at 141 West Jackson
· 1848-4
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Finance History | CME Group — The Board of Trade at 141 West Jackson
kevin
People treat CME Group as a Chicago ticker that appeared when two exchanges merged.
The older half of that ticker opened for business on 3 April 1848.
Eighty-two merchants adopted a constitution that week and formed the Chicago Board of Trade as a place to settle forward contracts on grain arriving in a city that still lived by the lake and the canal.
The first rooms were over a flour store on South Water Street. Those rooms are gone. The exchange bought the Jackson Boulevard lot in 1881 and has stood on it ever since.
William W. Boyington's 1885 hall came down in 1929. The present Art Deco tower by Holabird and Root opened in 1930 at 141 West Jackson Boulevard, at the foot of the LaSalle Street canyon, with Ceres on the roof.
The mechanism that mattered was not the building. It was grading.
Once wheat could be certified as a grade rather than inspected wagon by wagon, a contract written here became interchangeable with another contract written here. That is what turned a forward market into a futures market. Standardized grain futures date to 1865 on this exchange.
The Chicago Mercantile Exchange grew up separately as a butter-and-egg market. The two firms merged in 2007 as CME Group Inc., which is the S&P 500 company. Open-outcry pits that filled this building have mostly gone quiet. The charter purpose has not.
The 1930 tower is a National Historic Landmark and a Chicago Landmark. The public sees the limestone, the clock, and the statue. The memory is the 1848 rulebook that made a wagon of wheat into a contract that could be sold twice.
Photo: via Wikimedia Commons
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