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