The Second Cartoon

The first cartoon represents the cutting process.  The cutting room is an immense area adjoining and under the same roof with the drying room.  The cutting-blocks are made of strips of scantling, set together after the manner of blocks of wood in a Nicolson pavement [think of lots of planks, set on the narrow side to make a road surface], and firmly banded with iron.  In the cartoon the artist has taken liberties which were indispensable for the proper exhibition of this process.  In practicing the cutting blocks are arranged side by side, with about three feet of space between them, and two cleaver meat men are employed, who change from one block to another, but neither leaves his own end of the block.

 Forming three sides of a square around the cutting-blocks and the trimming-tables.  Through the open side of this square the carcasses are brought to the blocks on an iron truck.  On the way to the block the truck stops for a moment on a platform scale to have the hog weighed.  At each block are two men, who never leave it.  These men hold the hog while the cleaver men cut it.  They also tar the leaf lard from the sides, and pass the pieces to the trimming-benches as fast s they are cut.  At the trimming-tables, of which there are two sets, are from ten to twelve men, five or six for each block.  Each set of men consists of one man to saw and one man to trim hams, two to bone the sides and trim and bone the shoulders, one to saw out the backbone, and sometimes one to remove the pieces as they are trimmed.  Besides these, a boy at each block removes the heads, and a man with a truck from time to time takes away the trimmings from the floor behind the trimmers' tables.

 The dexterity with which these men work is astonishing.  Two blocs from the cleaver sever the head, and the hams are stricken off with the same number of strokes. The ham and shoulder trimmers wield the knives with a briskness only equaled by that of girls in a book house folding forms for the binder.  The trimmings are hurled through the air, each kind to its own particular heap on the floor in the rear of the tables.  Every one is in motion, and the air is full of scraps of trimmings flying to their destination.

from Harpers Weekly, September 6, 1873