Hi, this is Tommy Pope. I am so excited to be here. In 1854, as a 13-year old orphan boy, I came to live and work on the Hallock farm for four years and became a life-long friend of Halsey Hallock, who was about my age.

One of my daily jobs was feeding the pigs. They called it slopping the hogs. These pigs were a recycling system in themselves. We gave them all the food garbage from the house, and they gave us the most delicious bacon that Halsey’s mother Arminda cured herself in that smokehouse right over there to your right. Instead of throwing away potatoes that were not good enough to sell, Halsey’s father Herman cooked them in a big pot, and I fed those to the pigs, too.

Nearly every day, Arminda made butter to sell to Riverhead merchants. The left-over buttermilk, I fed to the pigs. “Nothing wasted, nothing wanted” they used to say. And of course, I also got to help the Hallocks shovel the manure out of the pig house to use as fertilizer on their fields. It was a lot of work, but I have fond memories of the Hallocks and still wrote them letters 50 years later, from Idaho where I made and lost a fortune as the owner of a silver mine.

Now look around for the next stop, our manure spreader. It’s on wheels, so may be a little hard to find! And then go to my corn crib.