Domestic pig

Domestic pigs were central to the farm life remembered by Harry S. Truman: they supplied food, demanded daily care, and became animals he knew individually. The book also places hogs at the center of a wartime raid on the Young family farm, where their loss became part of a family memory that differed from the official record.

Farm Life and Food

On the Young family’s farms, hogs were part of a broad agricultural abundance that included cattle, horses, sheep, and poultry. In Harry’s recollections, that abundance was especially vivid at the table. After the late-autumn freeze came hog-killing time, followed by homemade sausages, souse, pickled pigs’ feet, and lard rendered in a large iron kettle. Family lore held that the kettle was too heavy for James Henry Lane to carry away.

Pork was one element in a wider household food economy. The crowded kitchen also produced preserves, pies, corn pudding, and other foods from the farms. The account connects the animals’ place in agricultural work to the security and plenty Harry remembered from his childhood.

Work and Individual Animals

As an adult, Harry worked through the recurring demands of the farm: tending crops, repairing equipment, mending fences, and caring for livestock. He learned about animals from his father and became highly knowledgeable about them. The farm raised Hampshire hogs, and Harry’s particular affection for pigs stood out even within this practical routine: he called them Mud, Rats, and Carrie Nation. The names distinguish individual animals within a working herd, without separating that affection from the farm’s productive life.

Wartime Loss and Conflicting Accounts

During the Civil War, forces under James Henry Lane were remembered as killing four hundred Hampshire hogs on the Young farm and taking only the hams. The account describes this episode through Harriet Louisa Young’s recollections and stories repeated by children who witnessed the events. The hogs’ destruction is presented alongside other losses and abuses during the raid, making the animals part of the family’s enduring account of wartime dispossession.

The formal claim Harriet Louisa Young filed in 1902 gives a different accounting. It attributes the theft of forty-four hogs, along with bacon and other goods, to Colonel Burris in October 1862, rather than to James Henry Lane. The claim listed total losses of $21,442, but the remembered raid and the official inventory do not align in every detail. This discrepancy matters to the narrative: the pigs appear both as countable property in a compensation claim and as part of a family story whose emotional force survived beyond what the document recorded.