Pork
The History of Pork Packing in Indiana
HOW LITTLE PIGGIES GO TO MARKET BY CHARITY SINGLETON CRAIG
Photo courtesy of Indiana Historical Society, P0159
W
hen I was a young girl, late fall weekends often meant accompanying my parents to a friend’s farm to help butcher hogs. Of course, I often stayed inside and played with the cats during the dirtiest work, but once they got to the lard rendering I’d make an appearance. Fresh cracklins were hard to resist. Small-scale pork processing and packing, like my parent’s friends did, was almost unheard of in the 1970s and 1980s when I was a girl; several cultural, economic and technological advances coincided at the end of the 19th century to bring an end to small-scale pork processing. However, a century earlier when Hoosiers were far more self-reliant for their food supply, the practice was much more common. “In the opening decades of the 1800s innumerable farmer-packers either killed animals and cured meat for their own use during the winter months or took their surpluses in the form of ‘dead’ meat or livestock to local market towns on the Ohio-Mississippi River system,” writes Margaret Walsh in her book The Rise of the Midwestern Meat Packing Industry. Willis Hammer, his wife Josie and daughter Lela May, are shown standing by hog carcasses and kettles, ready to process the meat and lard in the fall of 1898. They lived in a section of Spiceland Township known as Oklahoma.
But population growth in large northeastern and Midwestern cities portended a new way. “By 1870, 40.3 percent of the population of the Northeast and 20.8 percent of the population of the Midwest were urbanized. Assuming that all of the 8.1 million city residents in these two regions ate 122 pounds of pork per year and that western packers supplied 70 percent of their requirements, then domestic demand far outstripped supply,” Walsh writes. “Furthermore, the foreign market was expanding, and by 1870, 11.5 percent of western-produced bacon, ham, and barreled pork was exported. Most assuredly packers could sell their increasing meat outputs.” Besides urbanization and increased demand for factory-processed food, the pork packing industry also grew through the expansion of railroad lines and the development of faster communication through newspapers and the telegraph. As well, innovations inside the packing industry fostered efficiency and consolidation. According to Walsh, improved business structure and the implementation of ice packing during the summer months allowed some packing companies to grow exponentially.
edibleIndy.com
23
