stlbites.com – st. louis food blog of bill burge

An American History of Hogs

Dec 30, 2008 farming, general food

My parents are, to put it bluntly, antique hoarders. Apart from couches and dining tables, few of the furniture items in their home are truly serving their original functions. Their curio cabinet, for example, is an American Legion Hall gun cabinet from Floyd County, Iowa, and their living room coffee table is an egg incubator from an old barn. In fact, further proving their resourcefulness, they even have an antique wooden toilet, with a steel bucket inside, which they use as an end table, and which my father threatens, to this day, to serve chili from at a party.

While I don’t have nearly the same obsession with antiques as they do, growing up around them, the bug has, at least to some degree, worn off on me. All those years of countless trips to antique stores left me fascinated not just by the history of the items that returned to our own home, but by the stories surrounding every item I would encounter.

Today, in my own home, this is reflected in some of my own items like my dresser–an antique wardrobe I built shelving into–and a storage cabinet in our dining room which is actually an oak icebox. It has always been photographs, however, that I have been particularly drawn to. Even when they are reproductions.

Take those you’ll find in a chain restaurant like Mimi’s Cafe. Assuming they don’t outfit each restaurant with a different set of gathered photographs, the people in those photos are scattered throughout the nation in Mimi’s 138 locations. But who are they? Are any of them Mimi, and do their relatives dine in the restaurant, see their photographs, and think, “hey, that’s Grandma.”? More than anything I look at those photographs and wonder what stories the people would have to tell as they certainly never imagined that one day a subsidiary of Bob Evan’s would have them plastered on the wall.

Whatever my reasons for wondering about the people and places in these antique photos, due to my clear fascination, I recently began purchasing them along with vintage advertisements. In the past I had purchased some chef-related photos, but my recent interest in, and association with, hog farming, has me purchasing mostly photos that depict America’s historical relationship with livestock husbandry and hog farming in particular. My hope was that I would frame them and put them in my kitchen. However, what started out relatively harmless–like the above United Press Photo from the 1950’s–has morphed into something a bit more grim due to the captivating stereoscopic imagery I have found.

Largely unfamiliar with it myself, stereoscopy “is any technique capable of recording three-dimensional visual information or creating the illusion of depth in an image.” This was done by adhering two like images to card-stock and viewing them through stereoscopes that ranged anywhere from large pieces of wooden furniture to pocket viewers similar to View-Masters (which are simply updated versions of stereoscopes).

A “rural” beauty.

While that, in-and-of-itself is not grim, the images I have been buying have become more so with each purchase. Though they began innocently enough with a particularly cute looking pig just hanging out, it’s photos of slaughtering facilities I am most drawn to. Primarily this is because today people are incredibly squeamish about where their meat comes from.  To think of a time where people were out for a night of fun and viewing stereoscopic images of backbone splitting stations at a Chicago packing house is pretty extraordinary. Just stop and think about that for a moment.

Armour’s Packing House (Cooling Room) Chicago, Ill
(This is the Armour of Armour’s Hot Dog fame which is today owned by Smithfield Foods)

Splitting Backbones and Final Inspection of Hogs–Packing House, Chicago, Ill.

Unquestionably my favorite purchase so far has been the above stereoview.  On its back, it has a great deal of information about the photo and hog production in general.  Of particular note today, in 2002 Iowa was still the leading state for hog production with 13,263,73; though Illinois is no longer second having only 3,352,399. Also, you’ll notice the need to show people how to pronounce “refrigerator” as viable household refrigerators were only first introduced around the same time as the photo (1915).

This is the final act in dressing pork in Swift & Company’s great packing house in Chicago. here you see a row of carcasses of hogs, each suspended on hooks. You will notice that the carcasses are tied together so that the men may readily split the backbones with their huge cleavers. The tying together also makes the row a continuous one. Each of these men splits the backbones of some four or five hogs as the row is moved along tot the refrigerator (r?-fr?j’ ?r-?-t?r) rooms. Another row of carcasses immediately takes the place of the ones finished. This establishment slaughters about 5,000 hogs a day.

The great hog-raising section of the the United States is the same as that of the corn-raising areas. This is suggested by the figures that follow. In 1915 there were received in the Chicago stockyards 7,652,071 hogs; in Omaha stockyards, 2,642,973; in the Kansas City stockyards, 2,530,730; in the St. Louis stockyards 2,591,768; and in the Indianapolis stockyards, 2,435,319.

Iowa leads all of our states in productions of swine. In 1912, within Iowa’s borders there were 9,700,000 hogs. Illinois ranks second with about half this number. Missouri, Nebraska, and Indiana follow in the order named, with numbers almost equal to that of Illinois. The United States easily leads all other countries in the world in the number of swine. Forty-two per cent of the hogs of the world are in our country. Germany ranks second with one-third the percentage of the United States; Austria third with one-half the percentage of Germany. Russia is a close rival of Austria. These four countries together produce 71% of the swine of the world.

Of further local interest (because I was curious about the St. Louis stockyards), in the 1960’s, East St. Louis was actually proclaimed the Hog Capital of the Nation. Many think the decline of the packing houses was a leading contributer to the decay of our neighbors to the East.

For those that might be interested in where this journey takes me, I’ll post more pictures as I buy them.  Now to convince Ellie this is not nearly as ghastly as it might seem.

Tags: animal husbandry, antique photos, Floyd County, hogs, Iowa, slaughter