Waco History Podcast

This is Living Stories, featuring voices from the collections of the Baylor University Institute for Oral History. I'm Louis Mazé. At one time, the approach of cold weather signaled for many rural Americans in the South the time to begin planning for the annual hog-killing. It wasn't pretty but provided food for the coming winter months. Louise Murphy, who grew up in Falls County in the twenties and thirties, describes some of the preparations involved in a hog-killing: "We would have to get the old pot full of hot water and get us a barrel and get us a place to hang this hog. We had to have a cold day to get it so we could get our meat cold." Thomas Wayne Harvey recalls what his father did before killing a hog in October of '44 in Waco: "He had to dig a pit. And what he did, he went and got a fifty-five gallon drum and he dug a pit and he put the drum in there at a forty-five degree angle. And at the bottom end of the barrel, he built a fire pit that would heat that drum, and he'd fill it full of water until