So this day  Friday, April 11, 2008  is the last day, closing a deal struck over a year ago when the owner of the stockyards, the Central Livestock Association, sold off the last 27 acres of what was once 166 acres of mooing, bleating, undulating commerce. The new owners will soon bulldoze everything to make room for more buildings of light industry  pens for people.

Stockyard denizens in blue blazers and in Carhartt overalls, in fine cowboy hats and in cheap baseball caps, pause in the gray morning cold to talk memories and to sell memorabilia. They assure one another that they’ll soon be catching up at Minnesota auctions in Albany and Zumbrota. But mostly they just wait to buy and sell and ship and talk and do the business of livestock.

Here is John Barber, big and strong and 69, the yard’s main auctioneer for nearly four decades. What a voice he has, so deep and soothing that you want to bid on something, anything: Would there be room for a heifer in the apartment? He lubricates his throat with apple juice and Halls cough drops and says he doesn’t use a lot of filler words when singing his auction song because he doesn’t want to confuse people.

But that voice breaks a bit when he talks about this day. His wife, Toots, works here as a clerk, and so did his three daughters, and so did his father, Bob, hauling livestock. When Mr. Barber was a boy, he would ride in the cab of his father’s Mack truck for those 150-mile night rides from Milroy  and then they were here, father and son, in the roiling, toiling, raucous yards.

His father died not long ago at 93, he says. “You have to think about him” on this day, he says. And the slightest drop in that mellifluous voice tells you it’s time to talk about something else.