History of the Piggy Bank

Have you ever wondered why we save coins in a piggy bank? Dogs bury bones. Squirrels gather nuts to last through the winter. Camels store food and water so they can travel many days across deserts. But do pigs save anything? No! Pigs save nothing. They bury nothing. They store nothing. So why do we save our coins in a piggy bank?

Some say it come from the Middle Ages, metal was expensive and seldom used for household wares. Instead, dishes and pots were made of an economical clay called pygg. Whenever housewives could save an extra coin, they dropped it into one of their clay jars.They called this their pygg bank or their piggy bank.

However, there is another story that seems to be more reliable. According to Legends of America.

In the early 1900’s, a ten year-old boy, impressed by a traveling missionary’s sermon about lepers, decided to raise money to help a boy suffering from the disease. Raising a pig named Pete, Wilbur Chapman, sold the pig, donating the $25.00 from the sale to the boy with leprosy. His compassion caught the imagination of the public and started the “Pig Bank Movement” to help lepers and the name “piggy bank” was coined. A plaque commemorating the boy and the idea of the “piggy bank” is mounted on the Community Christian Church on Main Street.

It seems he bought the pig for $3 (as a piglet) and then sold it (after raising it) for the $25 mentioned in the paragraph above. On a side note, this is also the answer to why the pig in Charlotte's Web is named Wilbur.

So there you have it. That is why we have the piggy bank, instead of the squirrel bank.

In addition the Oct. 30, 1933 issue of Time magazine told this story:

Contributors to the American Mission to Lepers, which now supports 184 leproseries, own toy pig banks in which they deposit their odd coins. The idea developed 20 years ago when Wilbur Chapman, Kansas farm boy, bought a piglet, named him Pete, raised him to pighood, gave his profit to Leper missions. Last week Mr. Chapman, now a St. Paul electrical engineer, visited Manhattan to permit a firm-willed patrician from Richmond, Va., Mrs. Robert Randolph Harrison, to pin a silver medal on him for his boyhood initiative. Mrs. Harrison during the ceremony wore a little gold pig on a brooch over her heart; she is the "Honorable First Pig Lady in America," for ingeniously transforming Mr. Chapman's pig-fund idea. Like 80,000 others who learned from her, she sends toy pig banks to her friends. Proudly she recalled last week: "I started with six little pigs, and in the first year raised $45. Now in Richmond I am able to raise in good years $2,000 through 400 pigs I have out. . . ."

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