{
 "schema": 1,
 "id": "pig-mascot",
 "type": "art",
 "names": {
  "name": "the pig mascot",
  "aliases": [
   "the smiling pig",
   "the house pig",
   "Little Joe",
   "the roof pig"
  ],
  "said": "A place with a pig on it does not need to say what it sells."
 },
 "region": [
  "carolinas",
  "us-south"
 ],
 "facets": {
  "kind": "mascot",
  "state": "both"
 },
 "text": {
  "what": "One pig, drawn once, used everywhere a barbecue business puts its name: the sign, the menu, the sauce label, the takeout box, the trailer door, the roofline, the weather vane. It is standing, smiling and usually dressed. It has no job in the picture — it is neither cooking nor eating — and that is what separates it from the pig that serves itself. A mascot is an identity: a customer who sees a pig on a bottle in a grocery aisle is meant to think of a particular pit in a particular town."
 },
 "sections": [
  {
   "h": "Little Joe, and what a mascot is for",
   "text": "Maurice Bessinger's pig is the clearest Carolina case because it was photographed under a public-domain licence. John Margolies shot the West Columbia sign in 1988: at the top of a tall pylon, above illuminated block letters reading BAR-B-Q, a pink pig stands on two trotters in a red shirt with LITTLE JOE across the chest, a small cap on its head, hands tucked behind its back. The panel beneath reads Maurice Bessinger's Flying Pig, Coast to Coast, and under that a changeable letterboard was advertising for waitresses on the day of the photograph.\n\nCoast to Coast is the point. The same pig went on the Carolina Gold sauce bottles that by 1999 made this the largest barbecue operation in the country, which is how a pig painted for one drive-in in West Columbia ended up on shelves in states with no barbecue of their own. When grocery chains pulled the sauce in 2000 over the Confederate flags Bessinger raised at his restaurants, what came off the shelf was the pig.",
   "images": [
    0,
    1
   ]
  },
  {
   "h": "On a roof, and on a rod",
   "text": "The mascot does not stay on the sign. Wilber's Barbecue in Goldsboro put a pig on a weather vane, cut flat from sheet metal, turning above the roof of a restaurant that opened in 1962 — a running pig in silhouette, nose into the wind, with the four cardinal letters under it.\n\n*Inference —* a weather vane is a particular choice. A sign faces the road and can be read only from one direction; a vane is visible from every direction and points nowhere in particular, so it says a building is here rather than pointing at a door. Putting the pig up there treats it less as advertising than as the thing on top of a church.\n\nThe form recurs: a fibreglass pig on a porch, a pig on a trailer, a pig outline in neon over an entrance. The animal ends up in the place a weathercock, a cross or a name would otherwise go.",
   "images": [
    2
   ]
  },
  {
   "h": "Where these pigs come from",
   "text": "*Tradition holds —* most house pigs are not commissioned. A sign shop keeps a book of pig artwork, a new pit buys one, the letters change and the pig does not, so a county can carry the same six or eight pigs across twenty businesses that have never met. The blog Suicide Food gave that recycling its own name across an eleven-part series: Repetitious Porcine Emblemology, the stock pig turning up again and again under different names.\n\nA few are drawn once and stay drawn. Those are the ones that end up on a bottle, a T-shirt and a tattoo, and the ones people can describe from memory years after the restaurant closed."
  }
 ],
 "kin": [
  {
   "to": "cannibal-pig-sign",
   "as": "the same pig given something to do — a tray, a fork, a sandwich — which changes the joke.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "to": "roadside-barbecue-signs",
   "as": "the pylon, the neon and the bottler's panel the mascot rides on.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "to": "pigs-in-the-city",
   "as": "Lexington's sculptures, which are the house pig taken off the roof and set on the pavement.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "to": "maurices-piggie-park",
   "as": "Little Joe's home pit at West Columbia, and the sign that survived the 2024 fire.",
   "rel": "place"
  },
  {
   "to": "maurice-bessinger",
   "as": "who took one drive-in's pig onto grocery shelves across the country.",
   "rel": "person"
  },
  {
   "to": "wilbers-barbecue",
   "as": "whose pig turns on a weather vane over Goldsboro rather than standing on a sign.",
   "rel": "place"
  },
  {
   "to": "carolina-gold",
   "as": "the sauce brand the pig went onto, and came off when the chains dropped it.",
   "rel": "term"
  },
  {
   "to": "mustard-sauce",
   "as": "what is in the bottle the pig is standing on.",
   "rel": "sauce"
  },
  {
   "to": "hog",
   "as": "the animal, and the word a customer reads off the picture without being told.",
   "rel": "term"
  }
 ],
 "links": [
  {
   "label": "Maurice Bessinger — Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Bessinger"
  }
 ],
 "sources": [
  "s:commons-margolies",
  "s:commons",
  "s:wp-maurice-bessinger",
  "s:blog-suicide-food",
  "s:web-piggiepark-history"
 ],
 "provenance": {
  "default": {
   "tier": "harvested",
   "source": "s:commons-margolies"
  },
  "fields": {
   "sections[0].text": {
    "tier": "cited",
    "source": "s:wp-maurice-bessinger",
    "note": "the sign is described from Margolies's 1988 photograph; the 1999 scale of the sauce business, the flags raised in 2000 and the chains dropping the sauce are the Wikipedia article's"
   },
   "sections[1].text": {
    "tier": "inference",
    "note": "the vane is described from Jay Cuthrell's photograph; the reading of what a vane does rather than a sign is this project's own"
   },
   "sections[2].text": {
    "tier": "tradition",
    "source": "s:blog-suicide-food",
    "note": "the sign-shop pattern book is hedged as tradition — no sign shop was interviewed for this record; Repetitious Porcine Emblemology is the blog's coinage, cited"
   }
  }
 },
 "images": [
  {
   "file": "pig-mascot/pig-mascot-bessinger-s-bar-b-q-sign-west-columbia-south-carolin-825aefd.jpg",
   "source": "commons",
   "title": "File:Bessinger's Bar-B-Q sign, West Columbia, South Carolina LCCN2017709630.tif",
   "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Bessinger%27s_Bar-B-Q_sign%2C_West_Columbia%2C_South_Carolina_LCCN2017709630.tif?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original",
   "page_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABessinger%27s_Bar-B-Q_sign%2C_West_Columbia%2C_South_Carolina_LCCN2017709630.tif",
   "license": "Public domain",
   "license_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain",
   "author": "John Margolies",
   "credit": "Library of Congress\n\nCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2017709630\nImage download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/mrg/07500/07539a.tif\nOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/mrg.07539",
   "alt": "A pink pig in a red shirt lettered LITTLE JOE, cap on its head and hands behind its back, standing on the crown of a tall roadside sign above the words BAR-B-Q. Maurice Bessinger's, West Columbia, South Carolina, 1988.",
   "date": "1988",
   "primary": true,
   "sha256": "18f1715ba3c3adfd21d20e881b1390c505ccdd63d9cb506e2c1bd735cba379bb"
  },
  {
   "file": "pig-mascot/pig-mascot-bessinger-s-bar-b-q-sign-west-columbia-south-carolin-897b1ae.jpg",
   "source": "commons",
   "title": "File:Bessinger's Bar-B-Q sign, West Columbia, South Carolina LCCN2017709631.tif",
   "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Bessinger%27s_Bar-B-Q_sign%2C_West_Columbia%2C_South_Carolina_LCCN2017709631.tif?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original",
   "page_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABessinger%27s_Bar-B-Q_sign%2C_West_Columbia%2C_South_Carolina_LCCN2017709631.tif",
   "license": "Public domain",
   "license_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain",
   "author": "John Margolies",
   "credit": "Library of Congress\n\nCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2017709631\nImage download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/mrg/07500/07540a.tif\nOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/mrg.07540",
   "alt": "The Bessinger's sign at West Columbia photographed side on, showing the striped pylon carrying the Little Joe pig.",
   "date": "1988",
   "primary": false,
   "sha256": "6cd163d44487ad6093502671731c7b74bc04bf4e5bb87821e7c26820c60a8098"
  },
  {
   "file": "pig-mascot/pig-mascot-wilber-s-bbq-pig-vane.jpg",
   "source": "commons",
   "title": "File:Wilber's BBQ - Pig vane.jpg",
   "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7f/Wilber%27s_BBQ_-_Pig_vane.jpg?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original",
   "page_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWilber%27s_BBQ_-_Pig_vane.jpg",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 2.0",
   "license_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/",
   "author": "Jay Cuthrell",
   "credit": "flickr",
   "alt": "A flat sheet-metal pig cut in silhouette, running nose into the wind on a weather vane above the roof of Wilber's Barbecue, Goldsboro, North Carolina, with the four cardinal letters below it.",
   "date": "2005-10-01",
   "primary": false,
   "sha256": "df6a8340f5a71256ba634c0dafd5ca30bf9db37a006d0a3fd7549381dc0a1e5e"
  }
 ],
 "confidence": "medium",
 "needs_verification": true,
 "updated": "2026-09-16",
 "blurb": "One pig, drawn once, used everywhere a barbecue business puts its name: the sign, the menu, the sauce label, the takeout box, the trailer door, the roofline, the weather vane.",
 "region_terms": [
  {
   "key": "carolinas",
   "name": "The Carolinas",
   "state": null,
   "note": "both states together; use when a node belongs to the whole tradition"
  },
  {
   "key": "us-south",
   "name": "The American South",
   "state": null,
   "note": "for nodes shared with the wider region"
  }
 ],
 "kin_out": [
  {
   "to": "cannibal-pig-sign",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "the pig that serves itself",
   "as": "the same pig given something to do — a tray, a fork, a sandwich — which changes the joke.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "to": "roadside-barbecue-signs",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "roadside barbecue signs",
   "as": "the pylon, the neon and the bottler's panel the mascot rides on.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "to": "pigs-in-the-city",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "Pigs in the City",
   "as": "Lexington's sculptures, which are the house pig taken off the roof and set on the pavement.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "to": "maurices-piggie-park",
   "type": "place",
   "name": "Maurice's Piggie Park BBQ",
   "as": "Little Joe's home pit at West Columbia, and the sign that survived the 2024 fire.",
   "rel": "place"
  },
  {
   "to": "maurice-bessinger",
   "type": "person",
   "name": "Maurice Bessinger",
   "as": "who took one drive-in's pig onto grocery shelves across the country.",
   "rel": "person"
  },
  {
   "to": "wilbers-barbecue",
   "type": "place",
   "name": "Wilber's Barbecue",
   "as": "whose pig turns on a weather vane over Goldsboro rather than standing on a sign.",
   "rel": "place"
  },
  {
   "to": "carolina-gold",
   "type": "term",
   "name": "Carolina Gold",
   "as": "the sauce brand the pig went onto, and came off when the chains dropped it.",
   "rel": "term"
  },
  {
   "to": "mustard-sauce",
   "type": "sauce",
   "name": "mustard-based barbecue sauce",
   "as": "what is in the bottle the pig is standing on.",
   "rel": "sauce"
  },
  {
   "to": "hog",
   "type": "term",
   "name": "hog",
   "as": "the animal, and the word a customer reads off the picture without being told.",
   "rel": "term"
  }
 ],
 "source_list": [
  {
   "id": "s:commons-margolies",
   "kind": "dataset",
   "title": "John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive, 1972-2008",
   "author": "John Margolies",
   "publisher": "Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; mirrored on Wikimedia Commons",
   "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:John_Margolies_Roadside_America_Photograph_Archive",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "note": "Margolies photographed American roadside commercial architecture and signs for thirty-five years; the Library of Congress bought the archive and placed it in the public domain, with no known restrictions on publication. Fetched from Commons because loc.gov refuses requests from this machine."
  },
  {
   "id": "s:commons",
   "kind": "dataset",
   "title": "Wikimedia Commons",
   "url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/",
   "note": "each picture carries its own licence in its sidecar"
  },
  {
   "id": "s:wp-maurice-bessinger",
   "kind": "wikipedia",
   "title": "Maurice Bessinger — Wikipedia",
   "url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Bessinger",
   "license": "CC BY-SA 4.0"
  },
  {
   "id": "s:blog-suicide-food",
   "kind": "web",
   "title": "Suicide Food",
   "author": "Ben (surname not given on the blog; named as Ben Grossblatt by The Stranger)",
   "publisher": "suicidefood.blogspot.com",
   "url": "https://suicidefood.blogspot.com/",
   "accessed": "2026-09-16",
   "note": "929 posts, 20 December 2006 to 27 December 2011, still online. Catalogued depictions of animals presented as wanting to be eaten and rated each on a five-point scale headed Psych Evaluations, counted in nooses. Post tags: pig 539, bbq 399, chicken 238, cow 210, chef hat 114, sunglasses 107. An eleven-part series from 2007 to 2011 named the recycled stock pig logo 'Repetitious Porcine Emblemology'. The last post calls itself an indefinite pause rather than a closure. Archived at the Wayback Machine from 14 June 2007."
  },
  {
   "id": "s:web-piggiepark-history",
   "kind": "web",
   "title": "Uncover Our Rich History — Maurice's Piggie Park BBQ",
   "publisher": "Maurice's Piggie Park (official site)",
   "url": "https://www.piggiepark.com/our-story/history/",
   "accessed": "2026-09-15"
  }
 ],
 "tiers": {
  "text.what": {
   "tier": "harvested",
   "source": "s:commons-margolies"
  }
 },
 "primary_image": {
  "file": "pig-mascot/pig-mascot-bessinger-s-bar-b-q-sign-west-columbia-south-carolin-825aefd.jpg",
  "source": "commons",
  "title": "File:Bessinger's Bar-B-Q sign, West Columbia, South Carolina LCCN2017709630.tif",
  "url": "https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Bessinger%27s_Bar-B-Q_sign%2C_West_Columbia%2C_South_Carolina_LCCN2017709630.tif?utm_source=commons.wikimedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original",
  "page_url": "https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABessinger%27s_Bar-B-Q_sign%2C_West_Columbia%2C_South_Carolina_LCCN2017709630.tif",
  "license": "Public domain",
  "license_url": "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain",
  "author": "John Margolies",
  "credit": "Library of Congress\n\nCatalog: http://lccn.loc.gov/2017709630\nImage download: https://cdn.loc.gov/master/pnp/mrg/07500/07539a.tif\nOriginal url: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/mrg.07539",
  "alt": "A pink pig in a red shirt lettered LITTLE JOE, cap on its head and hands behind its back, standing on the crown of a tall roadside sign above the words BAR-B-Q. Maurice Bessinger's, West Columbia, South Carolina, 1988.",
  "date": "1988",
  "primary": true,
  "sha256": "18f1715ba3c3adfd21d20e881b1390c505ccdd63d9cb506e2c1bd735cba379bb"
 },
 "tag_facts": [],
 "recognition_facts": [],
 "acclaim": 0,
 "kin_in": [
  {
   "from": "barbecue-postcards",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "barbecue postcards",
   "as": "the house pig, which turns up on the card as often as on the sign.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "from": "cannibal-pig-sign",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "the pig that serves itself",
   "as": "the same animal without a job: a smiling pig that stands for the business but is not cooking, eating or serving.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "from": "pigs-in-the-city",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "Pigs in the City",
   "as": "the same smiling pig, standing on a sidewalk instead of a roof, with nothing to sell.",
   "rel": "art"
  },
  {
   "from": "roadside-barbecue-signs",
   "type": "art",
   "name": "roadside barbecue signs",
   "as": "the house pig these signs carry, and the reason people recognise a pit from the road.",
   "rel": "art"
  }
 ]
}