- Of or resembling swine or a pig.
- Of or pertaining to swine; characteristic of the hog.
- Of, or pertaining to, the pig.
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The below is an excerpt from a longer piece. All information is from written sources; if you are interested in specific sources, please contact Maria Powell: mariapowell@mejo.us
Madison’s “piggery” garbage farm
In the early 1900s, as Madison grew rapidly, the city, businesses, industries and residents filled a large wetland area along Starkweather Creek—in what is now the Eken Park and Emerson neighborhoods—with garbage, industrial, and commercial wastes. Beginning in 1920, newspapers reported “bog fires” there that burned for several days, which the fire department said were caused by “burning rubbish.”
Some of this area eventually later became the Demetral Landfill. When this area was too full to accept more refuse, and residential areas were being built over it, most dumping shifted to the area around the Burke sewage plant just to the northwest that eventually became the Truax Landfill). From the early 1920s through some time in the 1940s, this area was a city garbage dump and burning area where the city also had a garbage incinerator. As it grew exponentially, Oscar Mayer also dumped growing amounts of industrial wastes and sludges there.
Some time not long after it built the Burke sewage treatment plant in 1914, the city contracted with local veterinarian, Dr. J.P. West, the president of the state board of veterinary examiners, to operate a pig farm adjacent to the plant that received city garbage. Dr. West, a wealthy Madison resident (who later bought an expensive home on the city’s isthmus along Lake Monona) also did pharmaceutical experiments at the piggery, attempting to create a “hog serum” for cholera.
Below, Dr. J.P. West’s city “piggery” garbage farm behind the city Burke sewage plant settling basins in 1916. Photo from Wisconsinhistory.org
At West’s “piggery,” hogs were fattened by eating city garbage—a common practice in growing U.S. cities in the 1800s and into the early 1900s. It is likely, though not confirmed, that when these pigs reached the end of their garbage gorging lives, Dr. West sold them to Oscar Mayer.
As might be expected, the pig farm emanated foul stenches far and wide into surrounding neighborhoods. The people living closest to it (as well as the Oscar Mayer plant, sewage plant and garbage dumps) were low income eastside industrial workers (mostly at Oscar Mayer). Many were immigrants. Some lived in slum shacks along the nearby railroad tracks. They didn’t have the political clout or wherewithal to complain to city leaders about their horrible living conditions. (Hmmm, sounds a little like Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” huh?)
But in the early 1920s, Maple Bluff residents, including Senator Robert La Follette —who lived much further away but could still smell the piggery even at that distance—petitioned the city to shut it down. City council rebuffed this demand, voting to continue West’s city contract and also to provide funding so he could hire state penitentiary parolees to “unwrap” the garbage for low wages.
In June 1927, Governor Zimmerman personally toured the piggery, and following this a top state official issued an order that reformatory parolees no longer do this work. The State Board of Health declared Dr. West’s “so-called piggery garbage farm” a “menace to public health…a cause of discomfort and suffering of citizens of the state, especially of those residing in the vicinity of said piggery garbage farm.” This method of garbage disposal, he said, belonged to a “past age” and the city should expand the incinerator already at the site to take care of all of its garbage.
After an all-day meeting, the Board issued a resolution demanding that the piggery be shut down, and served notice to Dr. West. It wasn’t shut down. According to the Wisconsin State Journal, city officials “saw the necessity of doing away with the present method of garbage disposal,” but said the city could not afford the costs to improve the incinerator at West’s farm to handle extra garbage it would need to handle without the pigs.
West’s piggery was licensed by the city through the 1940s, when the U.S. Department of Defense took over the Burke plant to handle Truax Field military base wastes during World War II.
It isn’t clear whether West’s piggery remained next to the Burke plant during and after the war, but the city continued to send garbage to another West piggery on his land near Cherokee Marsh (where Cherokee condominiums and golf course are today) through at least 1953.
