Age of Swine

A hog and a man stood in the back room of a London tavern. “Take us across,” the hog said. “We’ll give you meat. Much as you want.”

The man looked down at the hog’s outstretched hoof. The hair on it looked like gray wire.

“Just take us across.”

The man reached out and clasped the hoof.

William Foreman sailed past Hog Island and sniffed. Was it pigs he smelled?

Surry County, Virginia, 1702. Dozens of Foreman hogs stood waiting to be counted in the cold.

Two frying pans hung in the kitchen of the clapboard house nearby. A roasting pan and a heavy iron pot. Twenty pounds of lard sat unmoving in a jar—the pigs’ pale butter, opaque and precious. Two Wills—Browne and Rofe—moved through the house, noting quantities in looping cursive. They pushed open the front door and looked out at the hogs rooting in the grass. A third Will—my ancestor—lay under the soil down the road.

A farm down the street from my house in New Hampshire maintains a herd of eight English Large Blacks. The Large Black is what pig people call a “heritage breed.” It was developed in England in the 1500s, and breeders have worked to keep modern Large Blacks similar to their ancestors.

I walked through rows of the farm’s grapevines, down toward the Large Blacks’ pen. As I approached, they lined up along their electric fence to greet me. The pen held two massive sows and six of their offspring. Each pig carried a patina of black dirt on its nose, between its snout and eyes. Their ears were so large they hid their faces. One of the smaller pigs inched too close to the fence. It squealed and spun around.

The pigs stayed interested in me for a minute, then spread out across their grassy pen. Back to work.

The Large Blacks spend their time digging and grazing. The routine goes like this: snip a few blades of grass, chew, grunt, find a break in the sod, dig in. Each of the small pigs I watched weighed around 175 pounds. The sows weighed upwards of 500. The pigs were self-propelled plows, digging furrows through the grass with little effort. They stayed mostly together, and as they chewed, breathed, and broke apart plants, it sounded like running water.

Brian Ferguson, the man raising the pigs, walked down and stood with me as I watched them root. They were looking for wild carrots and beets, he said, clover and chicory. It’s good for the soil when they tear it up like this. Aerates it.

Ferguson stepped over the electric fence and reached for the neck of the largest sow.

“The jowls . . .” he said. “You can tell how good the bacon’s going to be from the jowls.”

The sow jerked away from him, and he stepped back over to my side of the fence. The little ones are going to slaughter in a month, he said. Have to fatten them up with grain—four pounds a day per pig.

“You see that ham?” Ferguson said, pointing to the hind leg of one of the smaller pigs. “That’d only be a three- or four-pound ham.”

Hog Island reaches up from the south side of the James River. Sailing the river toward Jamestown, the English would first see the east side of the island, then the north, then the west. On maps it is a green lung riddled with blue worms. The colonists dumped hogs there in 1608 (the bargain was fulfilled). They practiced free-range farming. The animals thrived on the swampy peninsula, gorging themselves on a root called tuckahoe that, as one historian wrote, “burns the mouth of a human being like fire.” The pigs increased in number twentyfold their first years there. The English visited the island to shoot them. Indians hunted them, too.

Feral pigs spread from Virginia throughout the South, meeting up and mixing with the offspring of Hernando de Soto’s Iberian herd, which first made landfall in Florida. De Soto had explored the Deep South, driving pigs...