“The farmers around White Hall are killing some fine pigs before the ‘moon gets too old,’” the Daily Progress reported in November 1912. “Sausage and scrapple will soon be in evidence.”
For those involved in similar community rituals, hog killing time was a memorable event for both young and old. On the Gentry family farm in Mint Springs Valley near Crozet, Lillian Gentry (Kessler, Bondurant) (b.1901), recorded such memories for her loved ones. She said, “Even though we moved from the farm into the village of Crozet when I was twelve years old, there are many experiences that I still remember which stand out especially for me, like when the hogs were butchered for our home-cured meat.
“The hogs on the farm were raised for meat for the family, and to have some of the meat left to sell in the early spring when meat could be replaced by food from the gardens and the fruit trees. All of the farm families ‘round about had hogs. When the time came to butcher the hogs, the weather had to be cold enough to keep the meat, but not so cold that the meat would freeze. Men would gather at one farm to help butcher the hogs. Later they would go to another farm to help with the same work there.
“One of the necessary things at the scene of the butchering was a very large barrel tilted over on the side, in which there should be very hot water for scalding the hair off the hog, after he had been killed. Rocks were heated in the big fire built near the barrel and dropped sizzling into the water to speed the heating. Strong arms and backs were needed to lift those hogs, one by one, into the barrel, then out of the barrel and scraped of the hair and hung, heads-down, on poles that were set up for that purpose. Later, the hogs, all clean and dressed, were brought to a warmer place to be cut up into hams, shoulders and ribs and all the other pieces to be salted down for keeping…