Hog Butchering with Family and Friends

Mark Hagenbuch butchers 2001 detail
Detail of a photo of Mark O. Hagenbuch (right) butchering, 2001

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7 Responses

  1. Kirk David Swenson says:

    Great article. Yesterday I found a picture of my great grandfather Rutter J. Hagenbuch showing two of his hogs to my father when my father was maybe three or four years old. I am not sure if Rutter directly butchered the hogs or instead had that activity outsourced.

    • Andrew Hagenbuch says:

      Hi Kirk. I’d love to see the picture sometime. You are correct: Not all families butchered, even if they would raise hogs. I would say, however, if Rutter had a farm he probably did his own butchering with family and neighbors. Always great to hear from you!

  2. Julie says:

    My main memory from that day is how cold it was. I hung out in a breezeway trying to warm up but it didn’t help much. If I would’ve helped with the butchering, I probably would’ve been warmer. Fun fact – I became a vegetarian a little over a year later!

  3. Sue Hertzler says:

    I “helped” Myron and Harold after school on butchering days (every Tue during butchering season). I rode a differdnt bus to their farm, which caused quite a stir with the neighbor’s. Myron and Harold were bachelor’s. They received a call from the father of the 2 neighboring farm girls that I had sat with on the bus about “who was the girl that rode the bus?” My job was to get the customers ordered item and take their payment. There were meticulously hand written order books. My payment was a heaping full pie pan of pudding meat and time to do homework. A few years ago, after Harold died, the “2 neighbor girls from the bus”, who are now friends, asked me if I wanted the sign that hung in the butchering shed that had all the 1978/1979 prices. It now hangs in my house. 4.5 ft by 3.5 ft. Handwritten I presume by Harold Sechler.

  4. John Marr says:

    In the late fall and winter, my Grandfather, Clyde Marr and his neighbor, Raymond Miller butchered together. They would travel from farm to farm to butcher hogs. They would take almost everything that they needed to butcher along with them, except for firewood for their fires under kettles. The farmer would provide that and also extra help. After a really cold and snowy winter, they both built a butcher house on their farms and parted ways.

    Once grandpa had his own butcher house, he would either pick up the hogs the night before and put them in his pigpen or butcher the hogs that he raised on his farm. as I was growing up, I can remember in the mornings, going out to the pigpen and watching and helping him shoot the hogs and then bleed them out. He had a 3 point lift that attached to his Ford 2000 tractor, he would back up to the pigpen and attach a hook to a tendon on the hog’s back leg and then the hog would be lifted up high enough not to drag on the ground. The tractor would go to the butcher house and then put on the platform of the scalding trough, once the hair was removed, then the hog was lifted up and gutted and split into to and the butchering would continue.

    Almost all the time, there were the same three men who helped my grandfather butcher. They were Zender Young, Elwood Cotner and Myron Cromis. After my grandfather quit butchering Myron Cromis built his own butcher shop and butchered at his farm for many years.

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