Hog killing time was an important day in early rural America. Up until the 1950s, rural families in the American hardwoods always depended on pork and chicken for meat. Every family had a yard full of chickens and a hog pen, and the size of the family determined the number of “fattening” hogs needed. My experience with hog killing came from Southwest Arkansas and Northeast Texas. Up until I was 16 years old, rural families killed hogs during the first cold spell in November. The cold wasn’t to keep the meat from spoiling, but to keep the flies away.
Neighbors often helped and the ritual was always the same. Bring up a lot of firewood from the pasture and fire up the wash pot full of water drawn from the well. Most pots held 18 gallons of water. The hot water would scald the dead hog so all the hair could be scraped off with butcher knives, because hogs were not skinned.
Next came the barrel used for scalding, which in my day, was wooden. A slanted trench was dug in the ground and the barrel was placed in the ground at an angle, so the open rim was higher than the bottom. The scalding water partly filled the barrel, and the hog would get pushed down into the water from both ends to soften the skin so the hair could be removed. Planks placed in front of the barrel helped with pulling the hog out for scraping. Afterwards, they had a clean hog ready to hang, gut, and cut up according to tradition.
First hog killing time
I was about 5 years old at my first hog killing. I lived in Horatio, Arkansas, in 1938. I recall our neighbor, Bill Haynes, killed two big hogs. Bill let me shoot one of the hogs with the .22. “Shoot right between the eyes, and a little high,” he said to me. They scraped the first hog, and Bill showed me how to measure a hog’s tail. He said, “Pull the tail out straight, and lay your hand on his tail with your finger out.” I did, and Bill pushed my hand. My finger went into the hog’s rear end. I’ve never forgotten how to measure a hog’s tail.
When I lived with my grandmother, Maude Gilmore, she and three of my uncles killed hogs. We had no refrigeration in 1940, and we hung the milk and butter on a rope inside the water well. The hog meat had to be hung in the smokehouse and cured, or cooked and covered with lard in a crock. Cooked items were sausage balls and hog heads and feet for pickled souse. The rest of it was cut and hung in the smokehouse, rubbed with curing salt, and smoked with oak wood for several days.
Hardly anything from the hogs went to waste. Old timers used to say they used everything on a hog but its squeal. Maude even made salve out of the hair and skin scrapings from the hogs. Folks used the hog hair salve for everything from cuts and sores to shoes, belts, harness leather, bridles and saddles. For homemade farm items, it came in second behind lye soap. But making soap is another story.
