Maybe you had a piggy bank as a child or perhaps you still do. On this episode of “American Countryside,” host Andrew McCrea travels to the place where the piggy bank was born. It all began with a boy, a pig and an important need in the world.
In the early 1910s, the Chapman family was living in White Cloud, Kan. They heard William Danner of the American Leprosy Association speak about helping children who had leprosy in foreign lands. Mrs. Chapman set a goal to donate $250 to the cause.
But when she was $25 short, her young son, Wilbur, decided to take some of his savings and purchase a piglet he could sell to get the rest of that needed money.
After he sold the pig, named Pete, Wilbur donated the $25 to finish up his mother’s promise of $250. Wilbur wrote a letter to Danner to accompany the $25.
Danner was moved by what the boy had done and shared word of it through a Sunday school pamphlet the Leprosy Association sent to churches. The association then decided to make banks in the shape of a pig to send to Sunday school groups, which they could fill with donations.
That event is said to be the birth of the piggy bank that we know today. The pig was also immortalized in the classic children’s book, “Charlotte’s Web.” Author E. B. White named Wilbur, the pig in Charlotte’s Web, after Chapman.
You can visit the monument honoring Chapman and Pete in White Cloud. It was erected in 1938.
