Carrying On a Butchering Tradition

John Wenner is three days into a week’s vacation and elbow-deep in pig parts.

He’s cutting up a hog carcass, one of 22 trucked in from a slaughterhouse to the Petersville Ruritan Club in southwestern Frederick County. He and about 20 other men are separating meat and fat from bone and skin at four outdoor wooden tables.

It’s a hazy, 70-degree Wednesday afternoon, unusually mild for mid-November. By Thursday night, most of the meat will have been sold to the public. The rest will become sausage to be served Saturday at a pancake breakfast, the final stage of the fund-raiser.

This is a country butchering, an autumn custom once common in rural East Coast communities. Urbanization and health regulations have largely killed the tradition elsewhere, but it survives in western Maryland among church groups, volunteer fire companies and, especially, Ruritan clubs--a country counterpart to Rotary organizations.

Wenner, the 56-year-old chairman of the Petersville Ruritan butcherings, wonders if the tradition will outlast him. “I figure in another 15 to 20 years, you might not see this going on,” he said.

The Petersville club, named for an unincorporated community that doesn’t appear on most maps, plans two more butcherings this season, in February and March.

This event will net the Petersville club $1,000 to $1,500 for scholarships and donations to the local ambulance service, Wenner said.

Many members are farmers or former farmers like Wenner, who has worked in a quarry since his family sold its land in the mid-1970s.

Butcherings are held in the fall and winter, when the clubs count on cold weather to prevent spoilage. Many members recall butchering their own family hogs each autumn, something a few of them still do.

“That’s how you got your meat,” said Wayne Hawes, a retired government printer from nearby Brunswick. “Mostly, it was a Thanksgiving event for a lot of families.”

The hogs for the Petersville event came from a meatpacker inspected by the U.S. Agriculture Department, one concession the club has made to safety regulations since it started the fund-raisers in the early 1960s.

Otherwise, the butcherings are unregulated. As charitable organizations that sell food less than five days a week, the clubs don’t need state permits. And with no license to suspend or revoke for violations, “it would require you to go to court and seek an injunction, and, of course, that’s much more difficult,” said Kent Hedges, a Washington County food sanitarian.

The clubs’ practices may sometimes violate food safety standards, especially those regarding constant refrigeration of raw meat. But customers believe the meat is better than that sold in supermarkets at prices 10% to 50% higher.

“You can’t get any fresher than this,” said Tom Whitter of Brunswick as he and his wife, Sue, selected pork tenderloins, chops and fresh bacon from meat stacked on stainless-steel tables in the club’s pavilion, a nine-stall garage.

The meat was stored in commercial refrigerators overnight. On sale day, the outside temperature barely nudged 50 degrees, keeping the displayed meat cold.

Club members insist they are safety-conscious. “Anything I wouldn’t eat, we throw away,” said Glenn Pearl, 73.