of animals: creation of storage ‘‘lagoons’’ of considerable proportions. Even
in the Midwest, where many soils are semipermeable clays, lagoons are
usually well lined with heavy plastic to prevent leaching into aquifers and
watercourses. No such regulations existed at the time in North Carolina,
and many hog confinement operations excavated lagoons and never lined
them, although they were positioned directly atop aquifers and/or along-
side swamps (through which waters move), pocosins, creeks, or rivers.
Leaching proceeded apace. Then came storms, and some lagoons burst.
Great spills went directly into the Neuse, New, and Cape Fear rivers. One
spill alone consisted of million gallons of swine wastes.
Darkened hog farms with millions of fat occupants drowsily eating their
way to oblivion smelled bad already, everyone agreed. A study sponsored
by Duke University (during the mid-s) confirmed that foul odors in-
deed included toxic fumes—ammonia, most obviously, and worse. In
a Stanford University physician found permanent neurological damage in
a middle-aged, middle-class couple who lived half a mile from a confine-
ment hog farm in Ohio.^24 In eastern North Carolina, however, the big-
gest hog operations exist in the poorest and blackest rural neighborhoods
in the state—notably in Duplin and Sampson counties—where simple
justice lags and so-called environmental civil rights were long unimag-
inable. The lagoon breaks, however, plus mounting evidence of wastes
leaching into aquifers and streams, affected all classes. Burkholder’s dis-
covery confirmed that the wet commons were scarily imperiled; creeks,
rivers, and sounds were plied by poor and working-class watermen, by busi-
nesses, by wealthy summer people and vacationers—by virtually everyone.
An industrial-environmental struggle was under way, then, and along the
way, North Carolinians (and many others) began to reconstruct justhowso
many hogs appeared, in such a short time, in this unlikely and inappropri-
ate part of the state.
tCoastal Carolinians, along with more remote rural mountain folk, had
long resisted enclosure and by-the-book animal husbandry, demonstra-
tion agent Gaither’s – triumph in Hertford County notwithstanding.
Ultimately, though, hard times and the relentless campaigning of other
government-sponsored scientists and educators succeeded in converting
‘‘backward’’ down-easterners, as coastal plain folk have long been known.
According to Michael Thompson, ethnographer of hogs down east (and
a native himself ), the beginning of North Carolina’s great changeover to
modern pork production was the appointment in of William W. Shay