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Hidden History: The NYC Piggery War of 1859 [1]

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Date: 2023-09-26

The Piggery War of 1859 is one of the oddest incidents in New York City history.

"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.



Police clearing out NYC’s pigs photo from WikiCommons

In American cities in the 1800s, living next to livestock was a routine thing. On every street there were carts and wagons--and the horses that pulled them. Feral dogs ran everywhere. Many families kept their own cow, which provided fresh milk and butter in pre-refrigeration days. And fresh meat came from urban pigpens and chicken coops. Fed with whatever local garbage the pig-keepers could scrounge up, and often running loose in the city streets to feed themselves on the numerous trash piles, these pigs would sometimes attack children. After being fattened for slaughter on the city's garbage, the hogs would be sold to local butcher shops, were they were turned into pork.

As a result, city streets were often, literally, trash dumps, as the droppings of animals mixed with the offal and garbage that city residents casually tossed out of their windows. By 1818, NYC Mayor Cadwalader Golden was already complaining, "Our wives and daughters cannot walk abroad through the streets of the city without encountering the most disgusting spectacles of these animals indulging in the propensities of nature." In addition, the city was wracked by regular outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever, and other lethal illnesses, and in those days before the germ theory of disease had appeared, most people believed that sicknesses were caused by breathing in "bad air"--and New York City certainly had bad air.

So in 1819 laws were passed which declared free-roaming pigs to be a "public nuisance". But when efforts were made to round up the semi-feral hogs, there was fierce resistance from their owners. After several years of trying, the city eventually gave up. The pigs were free to roam again.

In 1849, however, after a series of new local laws which banned livestock keepers completely inside the city limits, the enforcement became serious, and most of the urban farmers were forced to move to a section of present-day Midtown Manhattan between Sixth and Seventh Avenue--which was then a mostly empty meadow at the northern edge of town. Very soon there were so many hog pens and piggeries here, with at least 2000 swine, that the area became known as "Hogtown". Pork became a staple food, providing a source of cheap protein and also delicacies like sausages and blood pudding. Even the waste offal became a source of income: the bones could be sold to make buttons or fertilizer, the bristles were used to make toothbrushes, and the fat was used to make lard or soap. It provided a livelihood for thousands of working-class people.

But by the mid 1850s, New York City began to change. The Erie Canal brought increased trade and commerce. Waves of immigrants swelled the city's population and steadily pushed its densely packed neighborhoods to the north--towards Hogtown. The Gilded Age was just beginning, and wealthy industrialists were building huge mansions in the fashionable areas of the city--and they began to complain about the mess and the smell caused by all those livestock animals. In particular, wealthy visitors to the newly-established Central Park had to pass through Hogtown on the way, and they didn't like it. Very soon, new complaints were being made to the City Council.

The conflict quickly devolved into a mini class and race war. The wealthy Robber Barons looked down their nose at the poor pig-farmers, and epithets began to be hurled at the mostly African-American, Irish, Dutch, and German pig-keepers in "Stinktown". One politician described them as "the lower classes of intemperate dissolute and filthy people huddled together like swine in their polluted habitations". The piggery owners, in turn, accused the elites of having "oversensitive noses", and pointed out that not only did they provide most of the food that everyone ate, but that this was also their only way of making a living.

Things came to a head in the summer of 1859, after the city appointed a new City Health Inspector, named Daniel DeLavan, who promptly ordered all of the pig pens removed within three days. Virtually nobody complied.

Mobilizing almost 100 officers from the NYPD, DeLavan’s health inspectors soon showed up at each urban farm, one by one, seizing the now-illegal pigs and tearing down all of the ramshackle structures and shacks. The pig farmers fought back to defend their homes and their livelihoods, sometimes violently attacking the police with pots and pans or whatever other weapons came to hand. It became known as the "Piggery War".

The very first target was the largest piggery in the neighborhood: James McCormick's pens with some 200 hogs. McCormack had surrounded his piggery with guard dogs and had let it be known that he was prepared to shoot anybody who tried to mess with his swine--but in the end, faced with overwhelming police force, he surrendered peacefully, and his entire farmstead was torn down.

Within just a few months, the pig farmers had lost the fight. All of Hogtown, and any other pig pens within the city, were forcibly destroyed. With their livelihoods now gone, most of these poor immigrants were forced to seek work in the ever-growing industrial factories. Large numbers of them left the city, moving to factory and mill jobs in New Jersey or Pennsylvania.

Just as quickly, the wealthy moved in to these now-empty neighborhoods, tore down all of the shantytowns and row houses, and gentrified them with brand new mansions. Today, Broadway and the fashionable Bedford-Stuy neighborhood stand where Hogtown's pig sties once filled the streets.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/26/2187908/-Hidden-History-The-NYC-Piggery-War-of-1859

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