How many hog oilers is too many hog oilers? Dan Laurie, who, with his nephew Zac Laurie, has amassed a collection of more than 200 hog oilers, struggles to take the question seriously.
“We’re still actively looking for hog oilers,” he says. “I will buy any oiler.” Zac, on the other hand, would be happy to tap the brakes. “I keep trying to get him to quit buying common oilers,” he says. “If it’s not rare, I don’t want it. But at the end of the day, we will never have them all. There are just too many.”

Some of the pieces in the collection are duplicates, and some will be spun off. “We do get rid of some,” Dan allows. “But if we find a broken one with a base, we’ll buy it if it means we can put it together with a part we already have to make a complete one.”
A display meant to be seen
Is Dan and Zac’s collection the biggest? Hard to say. But it definitely wins the prize for most attractive display. Housed in an old corn crib, selected pieces from the collection are carefully curated and artfully arranged.

There, hog oilers of every description are complemented by “goes with” pieces: vintage signs, feed and mineral supplement bags, hog catchers, hog castrators, scale model oilers, bona fide hog oiler oil cans, NOS nose rings, feed pans and troughs.
The comprehensive display lends depth to what would otherwise be a lot of cast iron sitting on the ground. Visitors are likely to spend more time there than they’d expect to – and that was clearly the plan. “Many collectors don’t display their oilers,” Dan says. “They don’t love showing them off. I love to share mine. We’ll show anybody this collection.”
Battling hog lice and hog cholera
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, hog lice and hog cholera (a highly contagious swine disease) could prove devastating to livestock operations. The hog oiler was seen as one way to combat the problem. Designs varied, but all had some kind of reservoir to hold oil and a means to distribute the oil onto the hog, often via grooved wheels or cylinders. Hogs would rub up against a wheel (or cylinder), causing it to rotate and dispense oil onto their bodies.

Companies across the U.S. produced hog oilers in many styles and sizes, including fence-mounted, stand-alone, walk-through and ratchet-governed. The most common were double-wheel models known as Columbians and Sipes. Often made of cast iron, early hog oilers could be quite heavy, with some weighing as much as 150 pounds. Later models, those from the 1920s on, were made of cheaper, lighter steel and sheet metal.
The first known hog oiler patent was issued by the U.S. Patent Office in 1902. The era of greatest innovation in oilers was 1913-’23. Up to 157 unique hog oiler patents have been awarded but collectors estimate there could have been as many as 600 manufacturers, many producing oilers that were never patented.

Some of the oiler manufacturers sold special medicated oil to be used with their devices, ostensibly offering further protection. Thrifty farmers, however, just used recycled oil or made their own cheaper versions. Although the U.S. government was willing to issue patents on hog oilers, it did not endorse their use, suggesting that oilers might be less than effective.
Finding treasures in the wild
The Laurie collection, which started about six years ago, was inspired by an oiler Dan got from his great-uncle. “We went somewhere and saw another one like it,” he says, “and that was it. You kind of have to be in the ‘hog zone’ to appreciate them.”
And to collect them. “Hog oilers are hard to come by,” Dan says. But he’s quick to admit that he makes it harder than it maybe has to be. “We’re not just going to auctions and buying them up, and we’re not big on swap meets. I hate getting on the computer; we’re old school. Besides, oilers are heavy. They’d be expensive to ship,” he says. “Sometimes we get leads from neighbors, and we do know a guy who calls us if he comes across an oiler.”

For this pair of collectors, the hunt is the thing. “We do this a lot in cold weather, but anytime we get a call about an oiler, we try to put everything on the back burner so we can take off and go,” Dan says. “We like to go out in the wild and find our stuff.”
And wild is often how they find it. “The oilers are not usually in a good place. We found one once when we were tearing down a chicken coop,” Dan says. “We get them home, and they’re full of mouse crap. We’ve spent hours with blow gun until they’re cleaned out.”

Hog oilers were used mostly in the Midwest, but Dan and Zac have found them as far away as New York, Maryland and Florida. “We drive to where they are,” Dan says. “We like to see where they came from, get them in their natural state. It’s fun to get the history behind an oiler, and we always end up dragging other stuff home too. We even look for them in junkyards; some of those will let people walk through.”

Barns and a garage dot the Laurie property. “And I still park outside,” Dan says, noting that the two men pick up steel to fund their hobby. “We’re not taking money out of a savings account for this collection,” he adds. “The key is to always have a pocket full of cash. The time to buy is now. They’ll be gone in a heartbeat.”
Getting the word out
The Lauries may be old school, but they aren’t afraid to do a bit of carefully targeted marketing. When they’re on the hunt, they wear brightly colored T-shirts printed with “I COLLECT HOG OILERS.” “People see us and say, ‘Seriously?” Dan admits with a grin. “But it’s good advertising.”
On road trip stops, they post fliers with their phone numbers on tear-off tabs. “One Saturday, we were in Nebraska, out past Gretna,” he recalls. “We put flyers in every gas station, every diner and every convenience store we saw. An old guy saw what we were doing and read the flier. He told us to go down the road to a place on the left, and leave a flier there.”

Dan and Zac followed his directions – and ended up in a church parking lot. “We left a flier in the door,” Dan says, “and we got three oilers from that flier the next day.” Incredibly, they ran into the old gentleman again and told him about their good luck at what they considered an unlikely place to post fliers. Their new friend was not surprised, asking “Where did you think all the farmers were going to be on a Sunday morning?”
The two have made hundreds of stops – cold calls, if you will – at farm houses. “I will never get out of the truck,” Dan says, “but Zac does. He’ll knock on doors; he’s never been run off. And we always take a trailer. People will ask, ‘How’d you get that?’ and I tell them: ‘We went up and asked for it.’ You never know what you’ll get if you don’t ask.”
Literature is essential
Solid information is the heart of any collection, but other than a patent directory (Hog Oilers Plus: An Illustrated Guide) compiled by collector Robert Rauhauser (since deceased), little is available on hog oilers. And that is why Dan and Zac have put a priority on finding any literature they can.
“We collect any paper that says farm or livestock,” Dan says. “Zac will spend three hours looking through our notebook of paper we’ve found. And we’ll spend a lot on a magazine just to get one ad.”

That one notebook is full of plastic sleeves holding pages from magazines and brochures showing ads for hog oilers and related pieces. But that’s more than many other collectors have. “We hunt for literature as hard as we do for oilers,” Zac says. “We’ve learned so much that way. For instance, we wouldn’t have known that the Lenox Perfection oilers came mounted on a piece of wood.”
“Some collectors aren’t in it for the history, like we are,” Dan says. “We’d love to know how many were actually made. Did they all get junked, or did they only make a few? We love talking to other people and seeing what they have.”
Spinning the wheel of fortune
The prize of the collection is a pair of Swine-Ezers manufactured by Lisle Mfg. Co., Clarinda, Iowa. One is patented; the other is pre-patent. “We’re the only collectors known to have both versions,” Dan says. “It took three years to get them. I never thought we’d get the first one (the one in original condition), and then we found the second one (which had been painted). I could have quit collecting right then.”

The Swine-Ezer oiler has “all the gadgets,” Dan says. “The wheel only turns one way and it makes a clicking sound as it turns. I think the hogs liked the sound; they like attention. Everybody who sees it wants to spin it; it’s like the wheel of fortune.”
Dan and Zac prefer oilers in original condition. “We like our stuff rusty,” Dan says. “Once you change something, you change the whole thing. And if you don’t want to sell it, that’s fine, but don’t paint it. if you do want to sell, call us: We’re the rusty boys, that’s what people call us.”
For more information: Dan Laurie, phone (515) 669-9953; Zac Laurie, (515) 777-6304.
Leslie C. McManus is the senior editor of Farm Collector. Email her at LMcManus@ogdenpubs.com.