Modern History — 1867 to 1899 AD

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1867
Armour Meat Packing Co. moves its pork processing operation from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Chicago to take better advantage of the railroads and stockyards.
1868
Armour Meat Packing Co. of Chicago adds a second plant, taking over a slaughterhouse on Archer Avenue and setting up under the name Armour & Co.
1869
Armour & Co. adds beef to its line of pork products, and will start handling lamb next year.
Boston gets its first shipment of fresh meat from Chicago by way of a refrigerated rail car developed by William Davis; but the Railroad Industry resists losing their traffic in live animals bound for eastern markets and charge high transport rates.
French painter Jean Francois Millet (1814-75), a central figure of the Barbizon school's genre of portraying peasant life and bucolic landscapes based on direct observation of nature, completes the painting The Pig Killers, a gloomy French rural scene of a reluctant pig being dragged to its death.
1870
Hermann Kindta, a German folklorist, writing in the Oxford University's Notes and Queries, records among the superstitions current in the town of Mecklenburg at that time was one that directed a horses head should be buried under the pigs' trough to make them feed voraciously...
1872
Armour & Co. installs the world's largest chill room in its new plant at the Chicago Union Stock Yards. Prior to this, meat processing has been a seasonal business with salt curing the chief way to keep perishable meats from spoiling, but Armour, using natural ice, can now maintain operations year round.
The hog breed Poland-China is officially christened in Ohio. Previously known as the "Miami Valley Hog," as well as Butler- or Warren-County Hog or Magie- or Shaker-Hog. This lard-type hog — a backbone of the U.S. pork industry — is a mixture of Big China and popular regional stock in Southwestern Ohio, but traces its roots back to earlier Shaker breeders in New York State.
c. 1874
Russian paleontologist Vladimir Kovalevsky publishes the first attempt to classify, by Darwinian descent theory, the fossil and modern forms of the two largest groups of the worlds mammals. These are the artiodactyls, which include pigs, as well as cattle, goats, deer, camels and hippos; and the perissodactyles, which include horses, rhinoceroses, and tapirs.
c. 1875
U.S. politicians begin referring to the practice of securing federal money to fund popular projects in their home districts as "dipping into the pork barrel."
1876
Delaware canner A. B. Richardson applies for a patent on a new can shape and a new method for canning boneless hams.
Glasgow, England grocer Thomas Lipton, who learned merchandising methods in the grocery section of a New York department store, opens his first shop in England. He then buys two fat pigs which he names Lipton's Orphans. Lipton has them painted with the words "I'm going to Lipton's, the Best Shop in Town for Irish Bacon." and driven through the streets of Glasgow. By 1890, Lipton is the millionaire owner of 300 grocery stores and the founds the Lipton Tea Company.
1881
A vaccine to prevent anthrax in hogs and sheep is developed by Louis Pasteur.
Chicago meat packer Gustavus Swift perfects a refrigerator car to take Chicago-dressed meat to eastern butchers. Sides of pork and beef hang from overhead rails inside the car.
1882
German bacteriologist Friedrich Löffler discovers the bacilli that produce swine fever (hog cholera), swine erysipelas, and glanders (another livestock disease).
Van Camp Packing Co. is incorporated and packs 6 million cans of pork and beans per year for shipment to Europe as well as to many U.S. markets.
1883
In the legendary origins of the American hot dog, Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger of St. Louis, Missouri, begins serving "frankfurter" pork sausages in a split bread roll.
1885
The U.S. corn crop tops 2 billion bushels for the first time in history, double the 1870 crop. Most goes into hog feed, as U.S. cattle are still fattened largely on grass.
The meticulous logs of the Meerut Tent Club, a boar hunting or "pig-sticking" club in India during the British Raj, records that 85 boars were dispatched by its members during the 1885-6 season's hunting.
late 1880s
In the golden years of the British Raj [rule] over India (1757-1947) British gentlemen were again able to demonstrate their prowess as boar hunters. India provides all the ingredients for a resurgence of the sport of boar hunting or "pig-sticking" — plenty of animals, native servants and a class with the leisure and military inclinations to enjoy hunting. The pukka sahibs of boar hunting clubs throughout India, such as the Meerut Tent Club, kept meticulous records of every detail of every pig ever stuck.
A British officer serving in India, Robert Stephenson Smyth (later Lord Baden-Powell of Gilwell), achieves fame as a champion pig-sticker. In 1908, after distinguishing himself in the Boer Wars, he will found the Boy Scout and Girl Guides movements in Great Britain, both later incorporated in the U.S. as the Boy and Girl Scouts.
1887
A Year of the Pig in the Chinese lunar calendar.
Britons begin to eat lunch, dooming the classic [huge] British breakfast which still often includes ham, bacon, sausages, roast beef, kidneys, cold toast, butter, marmalade, treacle, eggs, porridge, snipe, scones and tea with milk.
1889
"Bogus butter" made from bleached hog fat is widely sold in the U.S. as pure creamery butter. It is no worse than butter made from casein and water or from calcium, gypsum, gelatin fat and mashed potatoes, though a margarine factory employee tells a New York state investigator that his work has made his hands "so sore... his nails came off and his hair dropped out."
1893
Fascinated by the legends of pigs in Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, the poet W. B. Yeats pens the folktale "Swine of the Gods" which is included in his book The Celtic Twilight, and later, in 1899 he includes in The Wind Among the Reeds, a poem "Valley of the Black Pig" about the apocalyptic beast called the 'croppy black sow' and the legendary valley of the same name where the enemies of Ireland would be defeated.
1894
Van Camp Pork and Beans are advertised in U.S. magazines in the first full-page food ad to appear in a national publication.
1895
Belgian bacteriologist Emilie Pierre Marie Van Ermengem isolates the botulism bacterium Clostridium botulinum. The anaerobic bacterium, whose toxin is 12 times deadlier than rattlesnake venom, has been associated in Europe with pork sausages whose cases provide an airless environment, while in the U.S. largely from pork and other foods that have been improperly bottled or canned.
1896
An etching and aquatint painting by Felicien Rops, Pornocrates, depicts a nude woman walking a pig on a lead as a flock of winged cherubs flutters overhead.
1899
A Year of the Pig in the Chinese lunar calendar.
The poet W. B. Yeats includes in his book The Wind Among the Reeds, the poem "Valley of the Black Pig" about the apocalyptic beast called the 'croppy black sow' and the legendary valley of the same name where the enemies of Ireland would be defeated. Evidently long fascinated by the legends of pigs in Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, Yeats also included in his earlier 1883 book, The Celtic Twilight, the folktale "Swine of the Gods".

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