100 Years Ago: Pigs Escape in Upper Alton

ALTON - Haywood North, Upper Alton resident, “had an earnest desire to make his own meat for next winter,” so he went out to the country and bought two little pigs from a farmer. He paid $10 (adjusted for inflation, this would be $183 in 2025). He brought the pigs home in his Ford car and placed them in a pen he had set up in his yard at 2201 Elizabeth Street. When he awoke the next morning, they had escaped. He searched the neighborhood in vain for several days. Finally, someone spotted them in a field near Rock Spring Park. North tried to catch up with them, but they eluded him.

A week went by without any other sightings, so North went into the Alton Evening Telegraph office to put an ad in the paper for his pigs. However, William Stone of Maupin Avenue had just been at the newspaper office to place an ad in the paper for the owner of the two pigs he had caught and was keeping at his residence, “hence, it was not necessary to put either ad in the paper as the owner of the pigs and the man who was holding them were brought together in the office of the Telegraph.” North went to Stone’s home to pick up the pigs. He paid $3 for the week’s worth of food they had consumed and took them back home in his Ford. He placed them in the pen just before dark.

When he arose at daylight, the pigs were gone. “As the dense fog of the early morning cleared away, leaving the grass and weeds as wet as though there had been a big rain on them [that] morning, Mr. North was seen searching the fields again for his pigs. He had on a pair of rubber boots for making the getting about in the wet grass more agreeable and he also carried on his shoulder an instrument which he expected to use in helping him to catch his pigs if such a thing should happen that he got his eye on them. The instrument referred to was a shot gun.”

It is unclear if he ever found the pigs.

Sources

“Huber’s Alton City Directory.” 1927.

Leshnick’s Directory Co (Peoria, Ill). 1924. “Leshnick’s Alton City Directory.”

Sanborn Map Company. (1926). Insurance maps of Alton, Illinois. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps, Map Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library. https://digital.library.illinois.edu/items/9aa52060-263b-013a-7ba8-02d0d7bfd6e4-6

“Upper Alton: Two Pigs Make Trouble for North End Farmer.” Alton Evening Telegraph (Alton, IL), September 16, 1925.

Garratt, R. D. 1897. Practical Pig-Keeping: A Manual for Amateurs, Based on Personal Experience in Breeding, Feeding and Fattening : Also in Buying and Selling Pigs at Market Prices. 2nd ed., rev. and enl. London: L. Upcott Gill.https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/109220.

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