Monument to a Pig Middletown, Ohio
Perhaps one of the strangest monuments in Ohio is the statue to a pig. It’s located near Middletown, Ohio, in a community that was formerly known as Blueball (but that’s a story for another time).
While the statue still remains, it’s pretty well hidden today, surrounded by trees and located almost in a resident’s front yard. It used to be across from the Towne Mall shopping center, but because of construction it was moved. In fact, many newer residents here have never even seen the statue or heard its story.
This is how it happened.
The Shakers, a now-defunct religious order that had started out in the eastern United States, spread west at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first of the sect in this area was a group that decided to settle in Warren County, Ohio.
The Shakers, best remembered for the fine, simple furniture they built, also were expert farmers, and like most farmers of that time they used fast-growing hogs as their cash crop. But the nearest major market for the hogs was in the East, more than four hundred miles away. This was before railroads and highways, so this meant the hogs had to walk all four hundred miles to market and, hopefully, arrive there without losing much weight. The hog that could do all of this was a far cry from the round porkers we know today. A thin hog, almost a razorback, that really didn’t pack much meat on his bones, was the staple of the farmers. These nearly wild animals could handle the long walk to market.
When talk of canals and railroads started to be heard in the Ohio country, the Shakers were farsighted enough to realize that when pigs could ride to market, whoever had the bigger hogs would make the most money.
A Shaker elder, David Darrow, knew of a breed of pig called the Big China back east, and he dispatched one of his flock to travel there and bring back a Big China boar and two sows to start a breeding program.
The program was successful, and by the mid-1800s the Shakers had developed a hog unlike any that had ever been seen in the world before. However, by that time the Shakers, who believed that their members should always be celibate, had started to die out for obvious reasons. Until this time they had maintained a local monopoly on the Big China hogs, and other farmers were envious. Finally, a farmer named Asher Asher, who had immigrated to America from Poland, went to the Shakers and convinced them to sell him two of their best brood sows and a boar.
It wasn’t long before farmers in the Miami Valley were all raising the new breed of hog. Some called it the Big China; others referred to it as the Warren County Hog. But the name that seemed to stick honored the man who broke the Shaker monopoly on the new breed. Most everyone called it the Poland Hog.
By the 1860s the hog had spread across the country and was winning so many livestock shows that they decided to give it a class of its own. That called for the ancestry of the pig to be traced. The Swine Breeders of America were confused. They knew of the Shaker role in developing the Big China hog, but what was this reference to Poland? Had the hog been crossed with a European pig?
That was when they learned about Asher Asher, the former Polish farmer who had purchased the first of the big hogs from the Shakers.
In the 1920s the Poland China Breeders Association decided to honor the event with a granite monument that took note of the first pedigree for a Poland China Hog, erecting what may have been the first statue to a pig in America.
So when you read of the enormous prices paid today for a grand champion Poland China Hog, remember it didn’t come from Poland or China, it came from the Buckeye State.
The statue is now located at the intersection of Towne Boulevard and State Route 25, at the bottom of a hill near the fire station.
