EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the 11th installment in our year-long examination of the adventures of Knox County farmer Harvey Devoe, who kept a diary for the year 1861, which has been annotated and published by historian Alan Borer and is available through online retailers. The series began on Jan. 4. It continued on Feb. 1, March 7, April 4, May 2, June 6, July 4, Aug. 1, Sept. 5 and Oct. 3. Harvey’s spelling and punctuation have been left as they originally appear in the diary.
Late fall found Harvey Devoe preparing for winter, writing letters, and participating in a hog drive. It’s something we don’t think about much today, with livestock trailers pulled by semis and railroad cars designed to haul animals to market. But in 1861 in rural Ohio, the only way to get hogs to the market was to walk them there.
In some parts of Appalachia, according to Mark Essig’s article “The Great Appalachian Hog Drives” on Atlas Obscura, hogs would be herded by the thousands into large drives from the hills down into the market towns. Being in the foothills of Appalachia, Knox County did not have such massive drives.
Instead, small groups would be taken by a farmer or small group of farmers.
On Monday, Nov. 25, Harvey helped his father drive his seven hogs to market in Fredericktown during snowy weather. Devoe does not give any details about the breed of hogs he and his father were driving, but this was the period in Ohio history where the Poland China breed was being introduced, a breed whose traits had been selected to make it a better walker for drives like this.
Incidentally, diary editor Alan Borer transcribes Harvey’s note about the pigs’ weight as “16.70 lbs,” which is confusing. A modern adult pig can weight over 500 pounds, but Civil War-era porkers would surely have been smaller. Perhaps Harvey meant that the seven hogs totalled 1,670 pounds in weight?
That would yield an average of a little under 250 pounds per animal, which seems plausible for the period.
Much of the rest of the month was spent in winter food preparation, which included gathering hickory nuts with his wife Martha, shucking corn, and burying turnips and beets.
In the days before refrigeration, an underground root cellar was a good way to preserve root vegetables for the coming year, but a startup farmer like Harvey Devoe would not have had time to build one yet. So he did the next best thing, digging a hole in the yard that would reach beneath the frost line, and burying his beets, roots up so that they wouldn’t rot. Whenever any beets or turnips were needed for food, all they had to do was to dig up a few. Not that difficult — unless the ground was frozen hard.
Sometimes we scold ourselves for the amount of time we spend chattering on social media. But in Harvey’s day, a more primitive version of the same thing was in place: Harvey frequently notes in his diary time he spent writing letters, especially to his brother Ed, who had gone off to Camp King in Kentucky.
Harvey typically wrote him a few letters every week, as well as others to various friends and relatives. While these were usually sent by mail, Harvey notes on Nov. 21 that a private from Camp King named “Wilber Foot” stopped by to visit and drop off a letter to Harvey from Ed. Foot was apparently on leave from the camp, so before he returned to camp a few days later, Harvey wrote another letter for Foot to delivery in person.
“Wilber Foot” was Wilbur D. Foote, who after the war set up as a farmer in Berlin Township, where he had grown up with his parents, Ephraim and Abigail Foote. Foote’s willingness to serve as courier seems a typical display of his generosity. When Foote died many years later at the age of 85, a local obituary said this about him: “He was of a particularly jovial disportation and his chief mission in life was spreading good cheer among his fellow men.”
Harvey also found another courier at one point to take a blanket to his brother, who probably did not have luxurious quarters at Camp King, the army training camp near Louisville, Kentucky. While Ed wrote back to his brother several times, Harvey does not detail what was said in their letters and says nothing else about the simmering war.
The month was mostly devoted to preparing for winter. Amidst all the other work, on Nov. 6, Harvey even noted the completion of a chore usually left in those days to the farmer’s wife: He did the dishes after breakfast.
