Visiting Our Past: Hogs, and killing them, were big in mountain lore

"That was a real hog killin' time!" Fred Metcalf interjected in his talk with Great Smoky Mountains ethnographer Joseph Hall.

With that expression, Fred was referring generically to a most enjoyable time, Michael Montgomery points out in his "Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English." When the weather went cold in traditional mountain communities, and hogs were slaughtered, a whole lot of music, dancing and partying went on.

Hog life was such an essential part of human life, local culture shaped its identity around it.

According to family lore, John Weaver, the legendary first settler of Weaverville, connects his local origin myth to hogs.

"While crossing Bald Mountain late in April," Nell Pickens recounts in her history, "Dry Ridge," "John was caught in a sudden and terrific snow storm."

He saved his wife, Elizabeth, and his baby son, Jacob, from freezing by scaring wild hogs away from under fallen logs, and placing his family in the animals' bed.

The next day, the family set out for their ultimate settlement. Jacob became progenitor of what future generations called "The Tribe of Jacob."

Pathfinder

Author Robert Morgan, raised on a Henderson County farm, has accorded hogs due honors in his fiction and poetry.

In his 1994 book, "The Hinterlands: A Mountain Tale in Three Parts," Solomon Richards — "the makingest young'un I've got," said his mom — surveys a road across a mountain by holding onto a hog's tail with one hand, following its instinctual path, and hacking trees with a hatchet held in his other hand.

"A hog is the smartest (animal) of all," Solomon told folks gathered at Kuykendall's store. "You watch a hog hunker down and spread its legs and you know a shaker (earthquake) is going to hit."

"A hog will always find the best way to get to its trough," a man added. "It will find the shortest way every time."

The insight inspired Solomon's community-connecting feat. "I was a lad with ideas," Solomon tells his grandson, years later, looking back on his youthful exploits. "I dreamed big dreams. I thought of myself like some boy in the Bible chosen to free his nation."

Incense

You almost feel like you're watching a Biblical sacrifice when Julie Harmon Richards helps Mr. Pendergast butcher a hog in Morgan's novel "Gap Creek." There's hardly a more graphic description of the process than the one on pages 82-85 of that book.

Having completed the hog scalding and butchering, Julie cooks cutlets for Pendergast and her family. "Fresh meat has a perfume of its own," Julie muses. "The steam that went up from the pan of tenderloin filled the kitchen with a golden flavor, mixed with fumes of the boiling coffee. The smells made me a little light-headed and out of myself."

Normally taciturn and hypercritical Ma Richards opens up and tells stories, leading Julie to note, "I don't know what brought us together in such fine fellowship. ... But it was like we formed a special kinship in the kitchen, at the table piled with tubs and dishpans full of pork fat."

Commerce and religion

Wilma Dykeman's source for the pig portion of her classic book, "The French Broad," was Edmund Cody Burnett, second cousin to Wilma's husband, James Stokely Jr. Edmund published "Hog Raising and Hog Driving" in the journal Agricultural History in 1946.

In the years before the Civil War, Tennessee was top producer of corn and hogs. Up until the 1880s, hogs were transported on the hoof.

Edmund remembers gazing at pig traffic through a window in a classroom of the old Big Creek Baptist Church. For two months in the late fall of every year, 100,000 of Tennessee's swines waited in line to board a ferry that was poled or pulled across the French Broad.

Edmund daydreamed about food — cracklings, which went into shortnin' bread, good enough for "mammy's li'l baby"; and hog jowls, the favorite of Rev. I.B. Kimbrough, who visited the Burnett house for dinner.

Edmund's childhood impression of Kimbrough was "that his jaws were much like hogs' jowls, while his expansive frontal landscape reminded me of a three-hundred pounder in the fattening lot. ... It seemed to me, as I watched him eat, that his whole body was simply oozing happiness."

Whole hog

In any respectful meat-eater's religion, every part of a slain animal is used.

"The prime source of meat for the early family in these mountains was hogs," reads the leadoff article in the first volume of "Foxfire." "Part of the reason for this can be seen by a quick look at the recipes. There was almost no part of the animal that could not be used."

Use of the hog went beyond food recipes. Vera Jones Stinson, featured in the Cradle of Forestry videotape "Women of These Hills," recalls that when her brother was burned badly, the local granny woman was called because the doctor's unguentine had had no effect.

Old granny came to the rescue with a salve made of wild ginger root, hog lard and balm of Gilead buds.

A mountain folk song called "My Old Sow's Nose" jests that a dead sow's nose night be used as a plow, but also justly proclaims that its head will make cheese and its feet "twill make as good souse, sir, as you ever did eat. Souse, sir, soap, sir, any such thing."

People of the hog

There's a macabre joke about a pig with a wooden leg. The pig had saved its owner from a house fire. How does that explain the wooden leg?

"Well," the farmer says, "a great pig like that, you don't eat all at once."

The uneasy tension between admiring and depending upon hogs on the one hand, and devouring them, on the other, engenders a stoic philosophy.

People of the hog cast their thoughts in hog terms, such as "Even a blind hog finds an acorn every once in a while." (Tipper Pressley of Clay County publishes a popular Appalachian heritage website called The Blind Pig & the Acorn, noting, modestly, that she hoped she'd find unexpected rewards in her venture.)

Horace Kephart's paean to the razorback hog in his book "Our Southern Highlanders" is classic.

"The razorback has a mind of its own," Kephart observes. "He thinks. ... He shows remarkable understanding of human speech, especially profane speech. ... He bears grudges. ... And at the last, when arrested in his crimes and lodged in the pen, he is liable to attacks of mania from sheer helpless rage."

Rob Neufeld wrote the weekly "Visiting Our Past" column for the Citizen Times until his death in 2019. This column originally was published May 19, 2014.

This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Visiting Our Past: Hogs, and killing them, were big in mountain lore