Map of pig nicknames from 1884

201201091227

H.W. Hill & Co. of Decatur Illinois, the sole manufacturer of Hill's hog ringers, produced this map called "Nicknames of the States." It is from 1884. The Library of Congress has it for free download in a variety of resolutions. I found my new desktop background!

There is a pig for every state in the union, and each pig sports a triangular nose ring.

The nickname for a Missouri pig is "Puke."

Puke-Pig

(Via This Isn't Happiness NSFW)

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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The jpeg isn’t big enough to read the names… and the TIFF is 163mb! There’s gotta be some happy medium resolution version of this, right? :(
- http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher
  
  The middle JPEG (178kb) seemed to be big enough to be readable, although I found that using the Zoom function (my browser is Firefox) helped make some of the smaller ones more readable.
- chellberty
  
  Riot down to 3 meg http://www.mediafire.com/i/?1088kwwwvxkzryi
Aaron Hubbard

Wow… thanks for the NSFW warning on the source link…
http://instantaneousinstances.com/ Spieguh

A nickname for every state in the union *as of 1884* plus some territories that would later become states. We hadn’t even had our gold rush up here in Alaska to boost the population!
http://www.youtube.com/user/Freethinkersanon Christopher

As a Tennessean I’m offended that the best whoever wrote this could come up my state was “Whelp”. But at least it’s better than the nickname they came up with for Utah.
- Navin_Johnson
  
  It appears to have originated in Illinois and our name on there is “Suckers” (it looks like anyway) so I wouldn’t feel so bad.
rasputinaxp

How about “Map of state nicknames from 1884″? The pigs really have very little to do with it.
blueelm

I love the scale bias!
Navin_Johnson

The illustration of the pig puking is indeed something special.
djwtwo

Looks like the right description is more “map of nicknames for people from states from 1884″.

Is the Utah illustration supposed to show a poly(pi)gamist?
- elix
  
  I like how the nickname for Utah is simply “Utah.”
  - Derek Hunt
    
    Sounds derogatory enough.
oldmapgallery

Unbelievable. This is a ridiculous coincidence. This is a really rare and obscure map, and I had just talked with a friend about this last week. Yes, prior to being cornhuskers Nebraska referred to themselves as the “bugeaters”, and the Illinois “Suckers” wasn’t about their gullibility, but how they got water. I don’t know who in New Mexico would’ve called themselves “greasers”.
usuallyconfused

he he…. Puke. Obviously, the originators had visited Missouri. Still fits, it’s how I feel every. single. day.
Antinous / Moderator

Plate tectonics works faster than I thought. Nevada was smaller than Massachusetts in 1884.
Mister44

From my 10 min of goggling, they didn’t invent any of these names – they were the already common names for the areas. Many names had an edge of classlessness to them.
Adam S.

North Carolina clearly should have been “Pigshit.” That’s not tar on their heels. No regulation of meat industry plus coastal swamp land plus regular visits by Hurricanes creates a monstrous North Carolina shaped cesspool 2 or 3 times a year.
- Teller
  
  Other than that, how ya like it?
- http://twitter.com/gratefulvideo gratefulvideo
  
  The UNC Pigshitters has a nice ring to it. I like Tenn. “Whelp”. That’s always been my reaction when driving through.
theepdinker

I had to download 163 meg to find out Washington’s was “Washingtonians”.
http://orbitnet.com JIMWICh

There’s at least two competing explanations for how Missouri had picked up ‘The Puke State’ nickname. In 1827, lots of Missourians rushed to stake claims on the lead fields near Galena. It’s said that the people already there remarked that, “It looked as if Missouri had taken a puke.”

Another explanation was that cholera outbreaks in Missouri’s early days convinced outsiders that, “Missourians vomited a disproportionate amount of the time.”
sean

Wait until Homer sees this! It’s funny ’cause it’s true!
seaanemoneman

That piercing process does not look like much fun.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Sparg-Otyebat/1818893984 Sparg Otyebat
  
  You should see what they do at the other end with a large rubber band.