SWILL ROUTE

Another story from Grandpa's childhood in the 1930s

Even though we raised corn, the majority of things we fed the hogs was slops - the leavings from the table. Papa had a route. Every day, we went around through Raleigh and picked up the people’s “swill,” as they called it. It was “slops” when it got to the farm.

There weren’t but three main streets in Raleigh - Fayetteville Street, Salisbury Street, and Wilmington Street. And they ran parallel to one another between the capital building and Memorial Auditorium. That was pretty much Raleigh. The residential areas were around the circumference.

One of our biggest customers was Durwood Green’s grill, right across from the courthouse on Salisbury Street. All the judges and lawyers and stuff like that ate down there. It was a big advantage for him to have someone to come and get that swill out of the way. I don’t think the city even had garbage collection at the time. This was way back. Anyway, Papa had a route. He had a Model T Ford truck he drove around to pick it up every day.

Folks would keep their leftovers from the table separate. They didn’t have anywhere to dispose of that stuff. In town, streets were paved, and most all the lots were just big enough for the house, with a little biddy back yard and very little front yard. Paper and that kind of stuff, you could get rid of. But the leavings from the table, now that was something else. If they threw it out there in the yard, they’d have a bunch of flies and maggots and everything, and Lord knows how much of the other stray stuff. So it was an advantage for them to have somebody to come pick that stuff up and get it away.

They kept it separate and kept it clean and made a special effort to not have any foreign material or paper in that garbage from the table. Papa furnished them a little bucket to put it in. They had a special place to keep it in the house so the flies didn’t get to it. Most of the time, they’d meet him at the back door. He’d dump it in his bucket, and they’d take theirs and rinse it out and set it back in there for the next time. He had a route like that, and that’s what we fed our hogs on.

He’d bring the swill back to the farm. We had a big slop house. That’s what it was called. A slop house. We had 55-gallon wooden barrels that molasses and vinegar comes in. Papa had bought it by the barrel for the store in Raleigh. He would dump that stuff in that barrel. We had a well that we had dug right near the slop house for water. He’d add some water to the slops and we mixed it up with a big old paddle until we’d get it the right consistency, according to how thick it was.

There’s one thing that Papa would add to it, and they called it Red Dog Bran. It was a powdered stuff that he bought in cloth sacks. The sacks were of a type of material like women made their dresses out of. They had all different kind of prints, and that was one of the incentives that made people buy them. They’d go to the store and pick out the pattern.

I don’t know what that Red Dog Bran did for it, but it certainly made it smell better anyway. He’d take a certain amount of that and mix it up, and he’d take five-gallon buckets and dip down in that barrel, one in each hand, and we’d go to the hog pens. Each pen of hogs got a different amount. Of course I was small and I didn’t have to do any of that. I was just there.

That’s the way we fed the hogs. Of course, it’s against the law to do that now. It’s not healthy. They claim it’s a way you can pick up diseases. But back then, nobody knew any different.