Coming Up with Money for Lard Was Hard

By Dale Welch

  As the cooler temperatures of early October turned into just plain cold days of November and December, it became hog killing time in the Upper Cumberland mountains. After folks killed their hogs, they would have fresh pork to eat right off. They’d even can sausage and such. For hams, shoulders and middling’s especially, they would salt cure them, covering every inch and later hang them in the smokehouse. 

   Folks would take leftover fat and heat it to render out the lard to use mostly in cooking and seasoning. They would also use it for other things such as greasing creaky door hinges and even slicking their hair back. As the year wore on into September, folks would run low on lard supply. Nearly everybody had a milk cow, so they could use butter for seasoning, but it just wasn’t the same.

   In the 1930s. John and Hannah Miller and Perry and Sarah Norrod lived down in Horse Pound, which was in Fentress County, near the Overton County line. Both families had just about used up their yearly supply of lard. Both John and Perry were coal miners but were on strike. They found out that they could replenish their lard supply tp get through until the next hog killing season because the company store had an eight-pound bucket of lard on sale for 25 cents. Now, that was a pretty good sale price, because a four-pound bucket was 20 cents. Plus, that eight-pound bucket could be used for several things afterward. It was really good for berry picking, gathering eggs and such.

   With the strike going on at the coal mine, there wasn’t any money flowing. Even when there wasn’t a strike, the company paid them in company script—their own paper money that could only be used at the company store. While the strike was going on, both Miller and Norrod worked in the logging woods for a while, but neither earned much. There just wasn’t anything that paid. Nobody had any money.

     Try as they may, neither family could come near to 10 cents all together. They weren’t starving. They had raised a big garden and had canned and put up everything they possibly could. All that without some meat grease wasn’t where it was at. They had to do with butter. What is better than butter for seasoning but some good old pure pork lard. Maybe if their children hadn’t used so much to slick their hair back. Such was the life of a coal miners family living down in the Horse Pound.