Needham History: The Porcineograph

Sometimes we just need a little weirdness.

William Baker’s Porcineograph, a map of the United States in the shape of a pig. It was made as a souvenir for the guests at his Sanitary Piggery Corner-Stone Laying party in June 1875, and became so popular that he had it reprinted for sale the following year.

The Porcineograph
or, the GeHOGraphy of the United States

Sometimes we all just need to get away from our lives and experience a little weirdness. And where better to find Weird than the Baker Estate?

William Emerson Baker made his fortune in sewing machines. In 1849, when he was 21 years old, he took an investment stake and formed a partnership with a Boston tailor named William Grover. Grover could see the great usefulness that sewing machines were going to have in his line of work, but the machines were not yet practical. Together, they formed they formed the Grover and Baker Sewing Machine Company, developing a practical stitch mechanism for industrial production. As their success grew, they established offices in Manhattan and Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Chicago and Milwaukee. This was savvy timing on their part. This was the beginning of the industrialized economy – the shift from handwork and piecework to mass production. Then in 1868, Baker sold his stake in the company and retired, a very rich man at the age of forty. After retirement, he purchased nearly 800 acres in the Grove Street area, in the southwest corner of Needham, as a summer estate that he called the Ridge Hill Farms. In the twenty years that followed, Baker filled his estate with over 100 amusements, attractions and exhibits.

Don’t get me wrong – William Baker was both smart and clever, and he did a lot of important things. His ideas about public health and nutrition were decades ahead of their time. He invested much wealth in the public benefit – the first Boston aquarium, the first Boston natural history museum (later the Museum of Science), the origins of MIT. He was a successful businessman, and also had a formidable understanding of technology, mechanics, and animal husbandry.

That said, there is also no question that he was rather, well, Eccentric. As one contemporary noted, Baker was “a gentleman who had accumulated a large fortune by the exercise of the qualities which compel success in every day affairs; and yet part of his life was lived amid surroundings as grotesque and in occupations as little reasonable as those which obtain in the world on the other side of the looking glass. He spent a great deal of money and a great deal of ingenious effort in the adornment of his estate; and in the countless inventions of a fantastic and extravagant imagination without a parallel, so far as we are aware, among the solid citizens of this Republic. [His estate] was a gentleman’s country place, a dime museum, a junk shop and a perpetual April Fool’s-day combined.”

Among Baker’s many interests was public health, and among his obsessions were pigs. He firmly believed that raising livestock in a clean environment would yield healthier animals that would transmit fewer diseases to the people who ate them. This seems obvious to us now, but in Baker’s day it was a radical and controversial idea. Pigs were especially problematic, because the most economical way to raise pigs was to let them forage for themselves. In th country this might mean a healthy diet of acorns and roots. But in the cities (and pigs were a common urban livestock) it meant that they foraged on the streets. They were very efficient at foraging, but that also meant that they happily ate garbage, manure, and any other refuse in the gutter as they found it. They are also susceptible to a wide range of diseases that are easily transmissible to humans (remember your mother telling you to never eat raw pork? – now you know.)

Baker promulgated his health theories in various ways. On the more humorous side, he had long stories about how pigs were the creatures responsible for the foundation of American democracy, and how they saved the US in the War of 1812. More seriously, he established an area of his estate dedicated to healthy stock-raising. His main attraction was the Sanitary Piggery. It is said (though this maaaaayyyyy beeeee an exaggeration) that the pigs’ accommodations were so luxurious that they were given little pig beds with little silk sheets. Even so, what they were given was a clean and nutritious controlled diet and airy living spaces.

The “Porcineograph” was designed and printed by Baker as a souvenir for the corner-stone laying party for the Sanitary Piggery, on June 19, 1875. To make the party even more festive (and Baker loved to give huge parties), he combined the corner-stone party with a centennial celebration of Bunker Hill and invited several Southern regiments to join him (the reconciliation of North and South was one of his other causes): “This GOOD-CHEER SOUVENIR was designed by the author for the Fifth Regiment Maryland National Guard – the Norfolk Light Artillery Blues – the Richmond Knights Templar – the Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, S. C., and other guests from the SOUTH, who participated in the Fete Champétre especially given in their honor, at Ridge Hill Farms, Wellesley, Mass. June 19, 1875, at the time of the Bunker Hill Centennial.”

The Porcineograph shows the United States in the shape of a pig. At the top is Baker’s credo, “Liberty of Conscience – Faith, Hope, and Charity.” Surrounding the map are the seals of each US state, and the favorite pork dish associated with each (for Massachusetts – Pork and Beans, of course). In the lower corners are vignettes about the War of 1812 and the founding of the Senate, events that Baker attributed to the agency of pigs.

As Baker describes his map –

“The Hog fairly displays more intellect, or are intuitively more susceptible of education, than any other animal. In recognition of this we have the “Porcellian Club,” one of the most reclusive of the social clubs at the Harvard University. There was on exhibition in Philadelphia, during the Centennial season, an educated pig, of which many have been exhibited throughout the country…. We have no cause then to be, ashamed of the Porcineograph, designed by the host at Ridge Hill Farms, and given by him as a Centennial souvenir in 1876 to such residents in Virginia, South Carolina, and the South, as participated the previous year at the laying of the corner-stone of the Ridge Hill Farms Piggery. It portrays the geographical outline of this Union of 35 States, exactly as shown by the U. S surveys of 1870, to which, however, is added one imaginary leg with its foot resting on Cuba. It adopts Lower California as a second leg, and the third is shown reaching to Sandwich, pacifically the Sandwich Islands. Alas-queue* is shown as the “caudal appendage” by special act of Congress…to complete the GeHOGraphy of the United States.”

(* ’Queue’ and ‘caudal’ refer to the tail.)

Pampered pigs dance and carouse on the invitation to Baker’s extravagant Sanitary Piggery Corner Stone Laying party on June 19, 1875.

Gloria Polizzotti Greis is the Executive Director of the Needham History Center & Museum. For more information, please see their website at www.needhamhistory.org.