Thursday, December 21, 2006

Hogs & Piglets

From Dave Hyre: "Couple of Hyre kids here raised on lower Oil Creek at Burnsville! (about 1920) This photo is displayed in my office. I often hear comments, "Aren't they cute"? I always ask, "Which two'?"

Dave Hyre shares the following two stories about hogs:

"I remember my grandma Lena telling me how the hog drives filled the main road alongside the tracks. It seems that an overland hog drive to market at Weston was still cheaper early 1900 's than the available railroad focused on serving the coal industry."

"Mom told me about the family slaughtering hogs each year, hanging them from a teepee shaped tripod in the farmyard. They would skin and butcher them from that position. She spoke of large vats of boiling water as part of that and how there was a terrible stench to the process. The boiling water was used to soak skins to remove boar bristle by scraping with sharp knives. A peddler man with a wagon mounted grinding stone went farm to farm to sharpen scrapers and knives during the fall butchering time."

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