Hogs and Hominy 149 



sack, and unhobbled, the squealing porker quickly found his 

 way to the corncrib. 



During the first half of the last century the center of hog- 

 raising in this country was the Ohio and Tennessee Valleys. 

 Eastern cities were already looking to the west for their supply 

 of bacon and lard. The hogs raised on eastern farms were used 

 by the farmer and his family, and sold to neighbors or a local 

 butcher. When I was a girl, in Putnam County, New York, 

 most families in the village had a barrel of salt pork put down 

 in the fall. Usually the barrel was kept in the cellar. Once, I 

 remember, when I was spending the day with a small playmate, 

 we played hide and seek. I went up into the unused and un- 

 heated third story to hide, opened a door into a "summer bed- 

 room" and shrieked at sight of a large dead hog laid out on 

 the bedstead. 



But Henry Clay's American System encouraged the cen- 

 tralization of industries. The East manufactured what the 

 Midwest needed to raise food for the East to eat. Nails, duffel 

 cloths, plows, hats, shoes, tools, spices, calicoes and Bibles 

 were returned to the eastern settlements in corn, wheat, pork, 

 lard, beeswax, beef. The Mississippi River trade was largely in 

 hogs and lard. Farmers soon found a profit in turning their 

 com into pork and shipping this to New Orleans. 



Commerce on the Great Lakes, bringing western farm 

 produce to the Erie Canal, boomed the city of Buffalo which 

 had not a single white settler when the Federal Constitution 

 was adopted in 1787. Sixty years later, in 1847, 98 steamers, 

 4 barques, 82 brigs, 495 schooners, 23 sloops and scows un- 

 loaded cargoes to be forwarded by canal. There were nearly 

 two million barrels of flour in those cargoes, and half a million 

 barrels of pork. The Buffalo elevators received six million 

 bushels of wheat, and half that amount in corn. The balance 

 in favor of wheat was leveled by three and a half million 

 pounds of lard. 



The diarist Philip Hone, who was Mayor of New York, has 



