Reader, I am curious. What do the words “Hog Reeves Are Part of the State, Too” say to you? These words are the title of my introduction to this summer’s JER  forum on local governance. I hope they signal that even hog reeves, the lowliest of local officials, had significant power. As I write in the forum introduction, “Local governments shaped the lives of early republic Americans more profoundly than national or state-level government did. And yet, we historians of the early republic talk about local government the least.” The forum expands on that point quite a bit. The forum does not, however, give much attention to the office of hog reeve in particular. In this Panorama piece, I would like to remedy that. Hog reeves were annually elected town officers, whose part-time position ensured that all hogs in the town wore a yoke and a nose-ring and were generally under the control of the townspeople. The job could include chasing and wrestling hogs. Successful candidates were often the youngest and least high status of local men qualified to vote, accorded little respect, as we shall see. But I think it is time we give them their due.

I am looking, as I write, at a list of men who won election to Town of Salem offices in March, 1792. The list starts with offices most essential to the functioning of the town: Town Clerk, Town Treasurer, Selectmen, Overseers of the Poor, et cetera. At the very bottom of the list is the office of hog reeve. Mr. Thomas Duckinfield won it that year.^[1]

I think we can assume that the Salem Gazette reported the election winners roughly in order of which office was elected first and so on. If so, it is significant that the Hog Reeve is listed after Inspectors of Tobacco, Measurers of Salt, Pound Keepers, and even after a man elected solely to prosecute non-Salem residents who took rocks and seaweed from the Salem shore. In 1790s Salem, the Hog Reeve was not the most important of town offices.

Indeed, hog reeves had become the butt of jokes. Few towns still elected them by that name, but might elect field drivers or haywards, whose remit would include regulating hogs and other animals, as well as the fences used to confine them all. Those that did specify hog reeves, according to a 1793 Boston newspaper editor, chose newly married men by custom.^[2] This seems to have been a mild form of hazing. Election to the post was often intended as a snub, as this 1790s vignette makes clear:

A certain Priest, being informed that he had been nominated in a public meeting to the office of a Hog-Reeve–replied, “I have hitherto supposed myself to be a shepherd among my flock; but some of my people, it seems, perceiving themselves to be hogs, wish me to be in a more proper relation to them, than the one I now sustain.”^[3]

That the joke was reprinted in largely Congregationalist New England, and describes a “priest,” suggests that readers appreciated both the insult of a hog reeve nomination aimed at a Church of England clergyman, as well as the witty comeback that he flung at members of his own congregation. Similarly, local lore in New Hampshire told of an overwhelmingly Republican town that elected a leading Federalist as hog reeve, circa 1812, as a joke. Like the priest, this Federalist also won a measure of revenge by suing his neighbors for damages their hogs did to his pigpen.^[4]

Joke they may have become, but hog reeves were part of a very powerful local government apparatus, with deep roots in English governance. The Oxford English Dictionary finds examples of the term in 1630s Boston, and connects hog reeves to the English office of hog mace, referring to officials who carried a staff to exercise authority over hogs in the streets. These hogs were a serious matter: large, powerful, willing to eat almost anything, adept at sniffing out and digging up root vegetables, quickly becoming feral, and dangerous to other creatures, including children. Even in 1790s New Hampshire, a Hog Reeve could warn, in all seriousness, that “any Swine . . .  found at large in the high-way, without yokes and rings according to Law… will be taken care of as the Law directs–and the utmost legal penalty will be exacted of the owners.”^[5]

“Hog Reeve” from William Bassett, History of the town of Richmond, Cheshire County, New Hampshire : from its first settlement, to 1882 (Boston: C.W. Calkins, 1884), page 199. Available digitally at https://scholars.unh.edu/history_and_genealogy/60/.

Hogs often roamed, scavenging what food they could find, before being reclaimed and slaughtered by owners. Nose rings for hogs are still used today, to prevent hogs from rooting and burrowing. The yokes made hogs easier for people, including hog reeves, to grab. Note the hogs in the 1880s illustration.^[6] They are unyoked and unringed, making the hog reeve’s job more difficult. Poor fellow.

But why should we care about a government job that already seemed antiquated 200 years ago? Reader, take a look back at that list of offices that Salem voters elected in 1792. The town regulated much of everyday life. As my local barber said, when she heard this story, the early republic sounds like an HOA: a homeowners’ association with lots of rules about how to live in your own home.^[7] I would add that hog reeves and measurers of salt and selectmen were part of a powerful and long-lasting state, which taxed and regulated and literally came face to face with citizens, far more than state or national-level government in that period. That is the story that my fellow writers and I are getting at, in our forum for the Journal of the Early Republic. If we want to know how early republic Americans experienced government, then we must give hog reeves their due.

Endnotes

^[1] “List of Town Officers,” Salem Gazette (MA), Apr. 3, 1792, 3, accessed using Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers database.

^[2] “Entertaining Corner,” Columbian Centinel (Boston). May 11, 1793, 4, accessed using Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers database. I rely on the Oxford English Dictionary for the overlapping duties of hog reeves, field drivers, and haywards.

^[3] American Mercury (Hartford, CT, Apr. 2, 1792, 4, accessed using Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers database.

^[4] William Bassett, History of the Town of Richmond, Cheshire County, New Hampshire: From its First Settlement, to 1882 (Boston, 1884), 199–200.

^[5] “Take Care of Hogs!,” Courier of New Hampshire (Concord), July 26, 1796, 3, accessed using Readex’s America’s Historical Newspapers database.

^[6] Bassett, History of the Town of Richmond, 199.

^[7] Thanks to Cash Strong, of Alpha Barbershop, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, for this insight.