This map, created by William Emerson Baker in 1876, is the public edition of a souvenir map distributed to guests at a party hosted by Baker in Massachusetts.

The map depicts the United States as the silhouette of a pig, based on data from the 1870 census. The pig’s snout is located in Maine; Michigan and Wisconsin form the ear; Florida and Baja California are the two outer legs, and the two inner legs extend beyond the mainland coastline, one reaching Cuba and the other the Sandwich Islands (as Hawaii was then known).

With these licences, Baker was seeking to achieve three objectives simultaneously. The first was celebratory, as a gift to the 2,500 guests at that party in Massachusetts. The second was activist in nature, as Baker was an advocate for food regulation and was pushing for a more strictly regulated industry that would guarantee hygienic conditions, which could prove profitable. And the third was to foster reconciliation: amongst the party guests were veterans of both the Union and the Confederacy, and pork was a symbol shared by the cuisines of both the North and the South.

Gastronomic information is arranged around the map, with all the continental states represented by their territory, their coat of arms and a pork dish that Baker considered the most representative. At the top, in a larger illustration, the pigs are celebrating the Union.

Sources

• This porcineograph
• An Eccentric Millionaire’s 1875 Pork Map of the United States