IMH 74:4 342-43

"Chronicles of Upper Burnet" (1)

Monday, November 8th

It was partly cloudy to-day and rained a little about eleven o'clock but soon quit. Father went to town this morning with
the wagon. Bill Hand came just before he started and taking a sack of his wheat went along. Father got home after
one o'clock. Before that time I was mainly occupied in finishing up the job of digging at the kitchen's end. Alvin went
to Jake's immediately after breakfast and was gone till nearly dark. Father and I got things ready, kettle, sled, etc.
and killed the black sow knocking her on the head with the ax after a good deal of fooling with the old musket. It was
a good deal of trouble throughout for lack of preparations. Em gave Father 18 heads of cabbage when he came home.

Teaching Notes: Hog butchering was an late fall occurrence on many rural Indiana farms. Ask your students to
speculate why the late fall. Two reasons are evident. One is that there was an absence of flies and the other is that
the temperatures makes the entire outdoors a refrigerator. Here is a link to a hog butchering in Southern Indiana in
2003. You may want to preview it before show it to younger children. You will note that they skinned the hog where as
the the journal indicates ( the kettle) that the Harrisons scalded the hog and removed the hair by scraping. In
tomorrow's entry you will see the advantage of leaving the skin on...since they are taking half the carcass to town.
If one had skinned it, it would be a prone to pick up dirt etc. much easier. Scalding and scrapping is much more
labor intensive although I have participated in skinning a hog and that is not the easiest of jobs. It took four of us
around forty-five minutes to skin the hog....and I was the only rookie hog skinner!

Eighteen heads of cabbage. They surely knew how to preserve the harvest!