A Time to Give Thanks

The cool crisp days of November invariably flood me with memories of childhood on the mountain. Especially clear is the annual event of the first butchering, an occasion that was a family affair.

The Burns Brood, how would you like to butcher with this underfoot?

We always butchered for the first time on Thanksgiving Day, it was always that day for as long as anyone could remember. We chose Thanksgiving Day because we butchered by the signs, and Thanksgiving Day was the first time it was cold enough to butcher that also fell in the right sign. We would butcher several more times throughout the winter, but none of the butcherings were as exciting as the day of the first butchering. On butchering day we would all rise at the break of day and build a huge fire under makeshift cauldrons, which were really just 55-gallon steel drums with one end cut out. When the water in the barrels was boiling, it was time go get started. The cold air made your fingers so cold that you were always huddled around the fire to warm your hands.

We usually reserved the animals that had something wrong with them for butchering. We didn’t want to breed down our stock with inferior animals, nor did we want to butcher our good brood sows. For example, one year we butchered a hog that we kids had named “Junior,” he was a prime candidate for butchering because he was born with a rupture. Junior was a friendly hog and would let us kids ride on his back. We knew that he was going to be butchered, but couldn’t help ourselves from playing with him.

The night before Thanksgiving Day, we always put the hogs to be butchered in the front stall of the hog house so it would be easy to pull out once the animal was shot. My granddad was usually the person to shoot the hog, and that in itself was a time-honored tradition. It is widely believed in my family that if the hog senses that you mean to do it harm, it will get mad and the meat will be strong. So my granddad would always walk into the hog house like we was getting ready to feed. Our hogs were always so tame that they would come right up to him. He would then shoot the hog between the eyes, which nearly always immediately killed the hog. My uncles would drag the hog out of the pen and cut its throat to let it bleed out.

My dad was never allowed to help with shooting the hog. It is said that the hog wouldn’t die as long as someone pitied it. One time when he was young, he pitied the hog. They figured out that it was my dad and sent him in the house. And that is where he was banished every year during the hog shooting. They would holler for him to come and help as soon as the hog died, and he usually was the one that “gutted” the hog. This process hooked the back legs of the hog onto a chain and used a tripod of metal poles with a come-a-long attached in the middle. The hog was gradually hoisted up in the air. The gutting took place then, and the head was cut off.

Gutting the hog was an adventure for all of us kids. We would all gather around to look at the shiny coils of intestine spilling out on the ground, and we waited impatiently for our reward. We were allowed to watch because “you learn from watching,” and one day it would be our duty to butcher the hogs. Our reward for watching was getting the hog bladder. It would be removed from the hog and someone would blow it up and tie off the end of it. It made a really neat, and durable balloon. All the kids would run around and play with the hog bladder. We’d kick it and inevitably play a crude game of baseball with it, using an old board for a bat and the hog bladder for the ball. After about a half hour or so the bladder would start to dry out and would lose air, and then the fun was mostly over.

Yes, that's me in the pink coat! It was a hand-me-down from a girl cousin, but as my mother put's it, "It was a good coat!"

Of course, by that time, the hog carcass had been dipped several times down into the barrel of boiling water so the hair would be loosened. We kids were expected to help in scraping the hair off the hog. We’d use anything that had an edge on it, but usually we used an old butcher knife. Nobody was ever concerned that we’d cut ourselves since we grew up using knives and knew how to handle them. So we’d scrape the hog and scrape the hog some more, and then the adults would again dip the carcass down into the boiling water to further loosen the hair. Slowly but surely the hair was scraped off the carcass.

After the hair was removed, the carcass was cut up. We usually had a large table that the men folk laid the carcass on. They then cut the hog into sections of chops, bacon, ham, sausage meat. Huge mounds of fat were set aside. While the men butchered the hog, the women were in charge of using the fat to make lard and cracklins. Once the fat melted, this oil was used to make cracklins, which are known today as pork rinds. There’s nothing better than a fresh cracklin’. There was usually a passel of kids around the kettle waiting for more to get done. When everyone ate their fill, Mom and the older girls rendered the lard and put it up in canning jars.

As the hog meat was cut up, it was washed in icy cold spring water that we’d carried up the hill that morning and the washed meat was then wrapped in freezer paper. When a pile of it was wrapped, it was carried to the icebox. Some of the fresh pork chops were set-aside for dinner.

Maw's Chickens

About the time the hog was getting cut up and as the job neared completion, someone would eventually holler “grab me a chicken”. Our chickens were allowed to free-range and with all of the commotion in the hog house (which was also the chicken house), all of the chickens were outside. So, we kids and some of the adults would have a grand chase on our hands trying to catch a chicken. We’d eventually catch a few and someone would throw them across the chopping block and after a whack with the axe, they’d let the chicken down. The funny thing about a chicken, it doesn’t die immediately. It will run around for upwards to a minute, so this was a big game for us kids. We’d be yelling and chasing a wild, darting decapitated chicken through the yard, until the chicken would bleed out and just fall over. We’d then retrieve it to my mother who would dip it down in the hot scalding water and start plucking feathers. I still recall the smell of singed feathers, and the acrid stench of the steaming hog guts. It really is a wonder I’m not a vegetarian. When the chicken was completely plucked and cleaned, mom would cut off the chicken feet and give them to us kids. Again, this was great fun for us. If you pull the “leaders” in a chicken foots, it will open and close just like it were alive. We’d continually harass each other with a chicken foot.


Maw's Chicken Coop

In the old days, the older folks said they used the hog intestines to put sausage in. They said there were three layers to the guts -- an outer, a middle and an inner layer. You discarded the outer and inner layers because they were filthy, and you used the middle layer for sausage casing. While the old folks may have used it that way, we didn’t. We made our sausage into patties.



I don't know who these women are, but this photo was in my Grandmaw's papers. I'm guessing this was taken before Women's Lib!

All of these activities took several hours and by the end of it all, we were all plenty tired and hungry, Mom and the older girls would fry up pork chops, and we’d always have roasted turkey because Dad got one from where he worked. Since Thanksgiving Day fell during the first week of deer season, we always had fried deer meat as well. We also had huge mounds of mashed potatoes, pans of stuffing, bowls of green beans, homemade bread, pies, cakes and cookies. Mom tells of how she would peel 10 lbs of potatoes for each meal, that’s how many of us there were. Usually the freshly slaughtered chickens were stuck in the icebox. After everyone had eaten their fill, and then ate some more, most of the men would go hunting, and the girls would clean up. Mom usually said, “I cooked it, so I ain’t cleaning it up”. We kids would head outside to play some more with the chicken feet, and dried hog bladders, and we’d usually end up poking around in the smoldering embers of the dying fires and allow our thoughts to drift toward retrospection…like never name the animals that you are going to eat…and think of all the leftover cakes and pies that sat waiting for us in the warm kitchen.

My Aunt Six and cousin Bub gathering hickory nuts.

Such were the Thanksgiving days of my childhood, and they truly were days and times to be thankful for.

Pigs: A Tale of Youth!

I remember one time when we lived on the farm we bought a pig, and while I know this in and of itself is not newsworthy, the manner in which we transported it home is. As I recall, when we bought the pig the vehicle we had with us was a Ford Pinto. Yes, a Ford Pinto. Not wanting to go back home and get the truck to haul it, we improvised by sticking the pig in a burlap sack and laying the sack in the back of the Pinto. My brother and I were so excited to have a pig, we petted the sack and talked to the pig, and would poke our hands into the air holes in the sack in order to pet the pig. I’m sure we scared it to death. Every once in a while the pig would let out a squeal, I’m sure out of fear and from being pestered, but Jason and I took it as a sign that he needed more attention. That poor pig. Mom and Dad told us to stop aggravating the pig, but it was to no avail, we were just sure that the pig needed us!

As we neared home, the pig began to cut a conniption fit, the likes of which had never before been borne. Well, this was the sign Jason and I needed to lay the back seat down so we could get back there and hug up to the sack in an effort to comfort the pig. Needless to say, it didn’t work and luckily we got home soon thereafter, or else I don’t know the pig would have survived the trip.

It seemed like we always had hogs when I was growing up. I recall that at one time we had upwards to 80 hogs and pigs. I loved having the pigs. We kept them in a big hog lot near my granddads house. For the most part, I remember best the hogs that we had the longest time. We built on to the old chicken house and made it into a 5-stall hog house, with each stall opening into a one acre lot.



I remember the first stall belonged to Snowball, a Middle White/Berkshire sow, who was ill-tempered but always had the fattest pigs. Snowball's piglets always brought the highest amount at market because they were as fat as little butterballs. She was sometimes a mean old sow though, and you never knew if she was having a good day or a bad day.

The second stall was for Spot, a Spots sow, who consistently gave birth to more piglets than she had teats. Spot would try to feed all the piglets and would be “pulled down” so much from the piglets that I’m pretty sure a strong wind would have blown her over.

The Third stall was for Bertha, a gigantic Hampshire sow. Bertha was special to us kids because she was so gentle, she’d let us ride on her and let us play with her piglets. Bertha was so fat, it was like riding on a walking mound of Jello.

Next to Bertha, in the 4th stall, was Junior, a mixed-breed boar that we bought at the stock sale for $1. Junior was so cheap because he was ruptured. We originally bought him to butcher (a hog for $1, you can’t beat that with a stick). Junior was gentle and us kids just loved him. The adults told us not to get attached to him because he was to be butchered, but we figured if we made a pet out of him, he’d be safe. Well, on this assumption, we were wrong. Come Thanksgiving Day, Junior was butchered. I remember trying to hold out loyalty for Junior by refusing to eat the heaping platter of pork chops that he had become, but my resolve must not have been too awfully strong. Junior tasted good!

In the last stall, we kept the hogs we were going to sell, or used to keep the boar when we borrowed one. We never kept a boar hog, to us it was a waste since we could just as easily borrow one as to keep one and feed it all year long.


A farm in Germany Valley near Slack Hands place.

We always borrowed a boar off of a man named Slack Hand, named that because he never would strike a lick at work. Slack Hand had a farm left to him by his father and he lived off of that. He never did take good care of his stock, and we’d always have to feed the boar a few weeks before it could "perform" for our sows. I never would have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself, but old Slack Hand’s hogs would eat rocks! Yes, I saw them do this! Slack Hand’s daddy was a first cousin to my granddaddy Don, so we was related to him, and Slack Hand was only too happy to lend us a boar hog for a few weeks because when we’d return the boar to him, he’d always immediately take it to the stock sale in Moorefield and sell it while it still had some weight on it! I remember I found it hilarious at the time, but now that I think on it, it really wasn’t funny, but Slack Hand never had a loading chute for getting his hogs on a truck. Instead, he just put down the tailgate of the truck and hogs would come from everywhere trying to jump up into the back of the truck. I know now that those hogs were trying to get the heck off of that farm and to somewhere where they’d be fed. The hardest part of getting a boar from old Slack Hand was getting the other hogs back off the truck since all we needed was a boar hog! They’d be packed in the back of the truck like sausage in a casing.

Some hogs near Slack Hands farm.

I remember my favorite pig of all time was a little piglet named Skunk. His mother was Gertrude. Skunk was my pig from the time he was born. I babied him and carried him around like a puppy. I always knew that we weren’t going to keep him and that he was to be sold when he got older, but I loved him anyway. I couldn’t bear to think that the slaughter house would buy him, so Mom assured me that if Crites Slaughterhouse bid on him at the stock sale, she’d say “No Sale” and bring him back home. Jason and I went with them to the stock sale the day that Skunk and his cohorts were to be sold (my brother also had a pig in this lot), and when Skunk and the other pigs were brought out for bid, you’d have thought we were at a ballgame or something. My brother and I stood up and yelled, “Hi Skunk, Hi. Wooooo. Wooooo. Skunk, we’re up here. Skunk!” We were sure yelling and cheering them on. I know we also named off the other piglets too, and tried to get them to recognize us in the crowd, but I can’t remember their names. We were so loud that the fellows that worked the stock sale came over and told us we’d have to calm down that we were scaring the animals!! Well, an old woman named Mattie, who had a huge dairy farm in Durgin, WV (near Baker’s Rock between Petersburg & Moorefield), thought it was cute that we were selling our pigs even though we obviously loved them, so she bought them all. After the sale, she came over to me and Jason and told us we could come and visit them any time we wanted to, and she said they’d be safe at her farm and she would feed them the leftover milk from her dairy operation.


Although we never did go see Skunk after we sold him, I do remember sitting with Mattie and asking her about Skunk when I’d go to the stock sale after that. She’d always tell me he was as big as a hog! I also remember she’d always tell me she was hungry and invite me to go with her to the cafeteria there at the stock sale. Mom knew her so it was okay. Mom always said Mattie was a nice old woman, and though you wouldn’t know it, she was probably the richest person in the South Branch Valley. Anyway, I remember Mattie always ordered us a hot ham sandwich and a piece of lemon meringue pie. They made the best stuff there at the stock sale cafeteria, all of it was homemade and it was run by farm women who really knew how to cook. Mom and Granddad used to pick on me after that by telling me that Mattie was the woman for me, she loved to eat as much as I did, and she could afford to feed me!


We sure had some good times at the stock sale and raising pigs.