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Hog Butchering

Hog scrapers

Last week’s blog featured the old pear tree planted by my great grandfather, Gottlieb. The old tree and some welcome cool rain in Whatcom County reminds me of a several day fall affair that took place each year under the old pear tree— hog butchering. Usually in October or early November rather than September, hog butchering was both a job and a gathering of relatives and friends. The hog scrapers used for butchering were stored by hanging them in crotches in branches of the pear tree. The scrapers eventually were surrounded by the tree and grew into the trunk. They are still there, left from the last hog butchered on the farm in the mid-nineteen fifties.

The pear tree was close to the hog barn where Grandpa raised his pigs. See it in the real estate photo here. It is the building to the left of the barn. You can see the pear tree in the photo. If you look at the picture of the pear tree in last week’s blog, Remembering the Orchard, you can just see the remains of the old scalding trough.

Gathering

Hog butchering was a fall event in many cultures, including the north central Europe from which my great grandparents emigrated. The Waschkes must have carried the tradition of the community event over from Germany.

My grandfather, Gus, was at the center of the event, which occurred after the temperature began dipping into the lower forties overnight, cool enough that meat could be cooled without refrigeration before it began to spoil and early enough that cured bacon, ham, and sausage would be ready for the holidays.

Raising pigs

Pigs were fed on kitchen scraps, cull or spoiled fruit and vegetables, and skim milk, all by-products that Gus could not sell to his customers in Bellingham. Before refrigeration was common, whole milk was an unsaleable because it spoiled quickly. Dairy farmers any distance from markets sold only cream or butter. My grandparents, like most dairy farmers in the area, had a hand-cranked centrifugal cream separator. When electricity arrived, my grandpa attached an electric motor. He filled out the pigs’ diet when necessary with oats, wheat, corn, and barley he grew in the fields, but their critical role was to use the nutrients that could not be sold otherwise.

Hog salmon

My dad, Ted, told me that when he was a kid, Deer Creek used to be choked with spawning salmon in the fall. Grandpa would sometimes take a wheel barrow and pitch fork to the creek and return with a load of salmon to feed to the pigs. The wasting flesh of spawning salmon from the creek was not fit for humans, but the pigs did not mind. Feeding spawning salmon was a bit risky because pigs slaughtered too soon after feeding on salmon tasted fishy. That meant only the earliest runs supplied hog salmon.

Mash

My dad used to say that pigs eat almost anything, but their fussy digestion will slow their growth if their fodder disagrees with them. My grandpa, Gus, cooked the pigs’ rations to improve its digestability. Every few days Grandpa would cook up a batch of mash, a sloppy porridge of whatever was available, heated until the texture began to smooth out and become more digestible. Skim milk was often the liquid, but after refrigeration arrived, water was more common.

Hog mash was usually unappetizing, to say the least, but I remember fishing a cooked potato out of a batch of mash and eating it. The mash was just rough cull potatoes boiled in plain water with lots of dirt mixed in, which made an interesting seasoning. I could not have been more than five years old and I thought the potato was pretty good.

The scalding trough

Grandpa built a heated trough that he used both for cooking mash and scalding for butchering. The trough was about eight feet long and three feet wide. It was made from heavy galvanized sheet metal bent into an elongated U. The ends of the U were thick fine-grained first-growth cedar slabs that looked as if Grandpa had split them out with a froe and shaped them with an axe and draw knife. The sheet metal was nailed to the wooden ends and the joints sealed with tar. The trough sat on top of a concrete firebox with a low brick chimney for a draft at one end and an opening for stoking the fire at the other.

A few years ago, I demolished the old firebox. Dad had already salvaged the sheet metal of the trough to seal off a corner of a calf pen against the winter northeaster. The chimney bricks were held together with lime and sand mortar (no cement) and had fallen in a heap. The firebox itself was in fair shape. When I broke it up with the front loader on the tractor, I discovered that Grandpa had reinforced the fire box with steel water pipe, which held the concrete together in the heat from the fire.

Butchering day

On hog butchering day, Grandpa would fill the trough about half full of water and start a fire under it. Then butchering would begin. Pigs were scalded and scraped immediately after they were killed to remove the stiff and inedible bristles while preserving the skin which gives flavor to bacon and ham and breaks down into collagen that gives the characteristic taste and texture to many pork dishes.

Like most kids, I was a blood-thirsty little guy and I took in the butchering process with relish, but I won’t go into it here. My grandpa could kill and butcher a hog without flinching, but I saw him treat those same hogs with tenderness as he took care of them. He would suffer himself before he would allow the animals in his care to be hurt. Slaughtering was a fact for homesteaders and kindness and compassion in the face of gory necessity is both contradictory and endearing.

The organ meats and innards were divided up among the neighbors who helped with the slaughter. All together, there were often more than a dozen relatives and neighbors helping with butchering and sharing in the bounty.

The first day of hog butchering ended with the hog carcasses suspended head down from branches of the old pear tree. They hung on gambrels, wooden crosspieces with sharp iron hooks that secured the animal’s rear ankles,  They were left hanging over night to cool before the next step. I’ll write about that some other time.

 

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Remembering the Orchard

An orchard still grows on the Waschke homestead, but not the orchard that was planted a hundred years ago.

Planning the orchard

Pear tree planted by Gottlieb Waschke

My grandparents began their life together in the northeast corner of their forty acres, just over the fence from my grandmother Agnes’ parents, the Matzkes, in a spot that was somewhat protected from the northeast wind by the ridge that marked the transition from the Silver Creek to the Deer Creek watershed. Their master plan was to locate a house and barn on the western boundary of the property, which was a section line and right-of-way for a county road.

My grandmother’s grandparents brought their son and his family to Whatcom County from Pomerania. My grandmother told me her grandfather traveled all over northern Europe building mills. She did not know or didn’t tell me the type of mill he built, but they were likely to have been sugar mills for converting sugar beets to sugar. My great-grandfather Gottlieb worked on sugar mills, which were booming during the late 19th century in Europe. That’s a story for another time, but both the Waschkes and the Matzkes were seasoned builders who helped plan the layout of the Waschke Homestead farmyard. The farm buildings, including the house, were laid out in a rectangle surrounding the well and orchard, a common pattern in northern Europe that resembles a castle keep. You can see the outline of the farmyard in the real estate photo here. The old chicken house and brooder house that marked the north side of the square are not visible under the foliage.

Gottlieb’s trees

According to my father, Ted, the orchard was laid out and planted by my great-grandfather, Gottlieb. No doubt Gus and Agnes, my grandparents, voiced their preferences, but Dad often said that no one ever argued with “Grossvater.”

Gottlieb collected seeds, cuttings and root stock from the German community. I say German community because I understand Gottlieb was never comfortable in English. He did his own grafting and some of the old apple trees bore more than one variety of apple. Because Gottlieb did his own collection and propagation, the old trees were unique and only approximately like the varieties available from commercial nurseries today. Unfortunately, my father and I let the old trees die and replaced them with standard nursery stock.

Cherries

The orchard grew three varieties of cherry. A cherry similar to a Bing grew near the house. We kids used to climb into the tree in late June or July and gorge ourselves until we lost our appetites. We called another tree the Bing cherry. It was intensely sweet, dark and smaller and firmer than cherries sold as bing today. Grandpa picked them for Grandma to can. Another tree bore small sour, soft, and juicy pie cherries, which went into tart, flavorful pies.

Apples

The first apples to ripen in the orchard were the Transparents, which were good eating after the shriveled apples that wintered in the cellar. The Transparents went into pies in July, but turned to mush and rotted away by the end of August. The apples we called Red and Yellow Gravensteins were later ripening, the best eating fresh apple from the orchard, but they didn’t keep well over winter. The Red Gravensteins were crisp, tart, and had with a rich aftertaste that reminds me of a good Amontillado sherry. I don’t get that Amontillado aftertaste from the Gravenstein apples sold in nurseries now. The Red Delicious and a Golden Delicious trees in the orchard were similar to the varieties in stores today, but smaller and crisper, almost hard. They kept better than Gravensteins. The best keepers were a smaller red apple that we called winter apples. They might have been a Mckintosh. The most exotic apple in the orchard, we called “Banana Apples.” They had a sort of acetone taste reminiscent of ripe bananas. Wikipedia has an entry on Winter Banana apples, but I don’t know if they are the same. The tree did not yield well, and I don’t remember using them for anything. For pollination, a crab apple grew in the orchard. Some years, my grandmother made sweet clove and cinnamon crab apple pickles.

Plums and nuts

Plums, both dark purple egg-shaped Italians and a lighter and rounder variety we called “sugar plums,” ripened at the end of the summer. There were two walnut trees, which died after a nasty spring northeaster in the early fifties that froze hard after many trees had begun to leaf out. Fruit trees all over the county were either killed or damaged by that storm. I believe that storm was the cause of the eventual death of most of the old trees. We also had a few Filbert trees, but they did not always pollinate and were often barren.

Pears

I have left the pears for the last. We had three varieties—two yellow Bartlett types and a reddish pear that was nothing like red pears in supermarkets today. One of the two Bartletts is the only tree left from the orchard that Gottlieb planted. The old pear tree is on its home stretch. Branches are dying, but the tree still bears copious sweet fruit.

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Gus and Agnes

Last week’s blog was Leaving the Homestead, in which I wrote about our decision to sell the century-old Waschke homestead and how my great grandfather arrived in Whatcom County and my grandparents purchased the farm that I lived on until recently. This week, I will continue my grandparent’s story. To see current pictures of the homestead on the real estate market, look here.

The family historian’s dilemma

As an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was trained as a historian. I took classes on history and historiography taught by professors who were distinguished historians themselves and working daily with my fellows who were on the way to becoming professional historians. I learned about objectivity and the rules of historical evidence and integrity. Searching for, finding, and compensating for personal bias was part of this training. Now, I find myself acting as a historian of my family. I know much more of the details of my family than I ever hoped to know of the Yangtze valley in the eighth through the third century BCE, the area and time that I studied for my never completed PhD thesis.

Yet, I am much less sure of myself in writing about my family. When I was studying the state of Chu in southern China, facts were hard to find and harder to separate from the romantic stories that were told by later generations. But after the records were rigorously examined, you might find you didn’t know much, but at least you knew what you knew.

Writing about family is different. I have many facts. I remember things I was told and I have read letters and looked at records. Much of what I know comes from a little boy listening to his dad, grandpa, other relatives, and their friends, talking while they worked and rested. But it is hard to distinguish fact from mis-remembered fantasy. What can I do with clearly remembered stories told by people long dead? As a trained historian, I am loath to trust my feeble brain, but if I don’t, I leave the story untold.

I have a solution: I am telling it as I remember it. I could be wrong. Don’t let my credentials fool you. The stories I tell here would not hold up as journalism or history, but I am sincere in telling them. You must trust me that I am doing my best. But I am not even trying to be a good historian or journalist, not even a good memoirist. I’m telling a story here, trying to be true to the spirit of my memory. I try to fact-check and cross-check, but when the cows are all back in the barn, I am just spinning a yarn.

Brush, stumps, and shade

Starting a family on forty acres of brush, stumps, and semi-forest was a struggle. In Sometimes A Great Notion, Ken Kesey wrote about loggers cutting trees to fight the shade. For homesteaders in Whatcom County, shade was deadly. Cattle couldn’t eat trees and brush. Crops to put by for winter would not grow in shade. The old settlers’ brutal tactics in the life and death battle against the shade would horrify many people today. My father told me that in the early days the loggers left behind fir logs so large, farmers dynamited the logs to break them up into chunks small enough to burn and make space for crops.

The forest fire that went through the homestead when my grandparents were young was likely to have been intentionally set. Both the early settlers and the Lummi and Nooksack tribes occasionally set fires in August and September to clear the underbrush and open the forest floor to sunlight. The Indians used fires to encourage Camas lilies and other plants which they cultivated and harvested. A forest fire made land clearing easier, eliminating underbrush and shade which were barriers to cultivation. Hard to imagine a beneficial forest fire in these smoky days of August 2018. The fires threatened their homes and livestock, they also made life easier for the old settlers.

Dynamite

My grandfather, Gus, became a dynamite expert. He stored his dynamite in powder boxes suspended five or six feet up the trunk of a tree fifty yards behind the barn. If the dynamite exploded, the damage was minimized by suspending the explosives above the ground where the blast would dissipate in the air. Dynamite itself was fairly stable and difficult to set off, although it had to be kept dry and thawed carefully if it froze.

Blasting caps are small volatile charges that fire easily. The small explosion from a blasting cap would trigger a much larger dynamite explosion. The problem with blasting caps was that they set off easily and were enough to blow off a hand or blow open a chest. I heard a story about a guy who lost his hand when he attempted to scrape what he thought was mud out of a blasting cap with a nail. Gus stored his blasting caps in a smaller powder box on a tree twenty feet from his dynamite safe. I was always warned that caps were more dangerous than dynamite.

Childbirth

Living in their cedar shack, my grandparents struggled to clear land, grow crops, and raise cows, pigs, and chickens. On Sundays, they walked to rest the horses. During this time, two daughters were born, my aunts, but both died before they lived a year. My grandmother, Agnes, grieved over these deaths, still occasionally shedding tears many years later when she spoke about them to her grandchildren. I am sure my grandfather, Gus, grieved also, but he did not articulate his grief. Childbirth and infant care must have been difficult. No running water or refrigeration and long days working in the fields and with animals must have been obstacles.

Doctors were scarce and expensive. When birth came, my grandmother preferred a mid-wife from the Lummi tribe over a doctor from Bellingham or Ferndale. She was hesitant about physicians for her entire life, preferring herbal remedies and patience. I have the name of the mid-wife, a Mrs. Wells, but I have not been able to discover anything about her. At birthing time, she came to stay a few days, presiding over the birth and my grandmother’s recovery.

Shocking grain

My great-grandmother was known for her physical vigor. I heard that one of my great-uncles was born during fall thrashing. My great-grandmother tied up her skirts and went out to shock wheat in the morning, came to the house to give birth, and returned to shocking before the end of the day, leaving the infant to her older daughters to take care of.

I helped a little with shocking before my dad got a baler and hired a combine to harvest the wheat and oats. The standing grain was cut with a horse or tractor drawn implement called a binder. The binder produced bundles of grain stalks bound with twine. These bundles were gathered in to shocks of four or five bundles stood upright to dry. Usually, the grain was cut while the kernels were still soft. In cool and damp Whatcom County, cutting grain while the kernels were still soft was prudent because the fall rains could easily flatten a field of grain and make harvest nearly impossible. Shocked grain would still dry and the kernels harden for thrashing.

Born in a real house

My grandmother was not a field worker like my great grandmother. My father was born in the cedar shack, but when my uncle, my father’s younger brother Arnold, was born, they had a new house with plumbing and wired for electricity, which would not be available for a few years. The house was built in 1916. I once saw old invoices from Diamond B, which still exists as Diamond B Constructors, that I think were for plumbing and wiring the house for electricity. Whatcom County Railway and Light Company was active already in 1902, but electricity did not reach the house until the Gus Waschke family had occupied the house for a few years.