Elgin Murphy — The Country Ham Man

Photo from Lexington Herald files.

Elgin Murphy became a successful small-town business owner running a country ham store in Sharpsburg. He visited around 500 farmers every week in the surrounding counties.

In the spring of 1951, Henry Hornsby, a correspondent for the Lexington Herald Leader, made a visit to Sharpsburg to interview a gentleman known as “the country ham man”.

Hornsby’s article tells the story of how Elgin Murphy became a successful small-town business owner.

According to the 1920 Federal Census, Buford Murphy, his wife Virgie and daughter Irene lived in Ezel, where Buford owned a farm.

The family moved to Sharpsburg sometime around 1925 and opened Murphy’s Grocery on main street.

Buford Murphy passed away from complications of influenza on Dec. 20, 1932 but his wife, daughter and son continued to operate the store.

In later years Irene and her husband Richard Best took over the family business.

By the time Elgin was in his mid- 20s, he had learned firsthand how to cure hams and started what became known as the country ham store.

Today, you will find the Citizen’s Bank located in the spot where Elgin smoked and cured his famous hams and his parents store was once housed where Dr. Womack’s office is currently located.

Hornsby began his story with a description of the back of the store, which he wrote, fronted the towns maid street and was the smokehouse where Elgin would have 150 hams smoking at one time.

Based on the article the building had a large storage room that could accommodate 1,000 hams after smoking and an extra room for 500 more.

The story goes on to relate how Murphy built up a trade that provided hams to customers all over the United States and even filled orders that were shipped to England, Germany and South America.

One of Elgin’s biggest customers was the Golden Horseshoe in Lexington, which was known to order about 15,000 pounds of ham a year. He was called on regularly to supply cooked hams for special parties.

The article went on to explain how Elgin went about the process to smoke and cure his hams and he preferred green hickory wood, but knew others who fancied apple or peach smoke.

The smokehouse, the article stated, was air-tight, except for a small ventilator.

The first day the ventilator stayed open and the house temperature was kept at 110 to 115 degrees.

The second day, the ventilator was closed and remained closed for the remainder of the smoking.

Murphy had no fixed length of time for smoking, the number of days depended on size, color condition and other factors.

What he aimed for was the proper coloring of the ham, which was a reddish brown, and was achieved after being smoked for six days.

After the hams were smoked, Elgin sprinkled a skipper compound around the joints, bones and string holes and a small amount of borax was added to the exposed bones.

Next, he coated the hams with sorghum molasses and covered the meat with black pepper; the hams were then ready for string and curing and placed on ham sacks the double thickness of heavy paper and hung up and forgotten about for at least a year.

Elgin would not sell any of his hams until they had aged to meet his standards of perfection.

Murphy’s hams were sold with a guarantee, and sometimes one would be returned.

Elgin told of one customer who had returned a ham he had bought because it had white specks in it, which to someone who knows good country ham, meant a mark of excellence.

And then there was an out-of-state buyer who complained of too much fat in his ham and returned a half-eaten ham to which Elgin was said to have refunded the man’s money but wrote him a note that said, “next time don’t eat half of it before you decide it has too much fat”. That customer was said to have become a regular.

Elgin also operated a store on wheels, which was a truck equipped with shelves and racks loaded with a variety of grocery items.

Cleve Fisher drove the “store-to-door truck to the rural areas of Bath, Montgomery, Bourbon and Nicholas counties to visit about 500 farmers every week.

The traveling-store was said to have averaged between $700 and $1,000 a week.

While some of his customers paid with cash many others traded, produce, eggs, hams and other meats for food or farm supplies.

Sometimes Cleve Fisher would trade items in the truck for turtles, catfish and once he traded for two Terrier pups, which Elgin sold to customers at the store.

Through the years, Elgin Murphy became an expert in the ham business and is still remembered today as the “Country Ham Man” from Sharpsburg.