That Touch of Mink

BRIAN: In thinking about different ways Americans have used animals over time, one that springs to mind is high fashion. In the mid 20th century, mink was the pinnacle of fashion. In the American Midwest, well, that was sort of a hub for mink fur production. The 1940 census showed nearly 3,000 mink farms operating in more than 40 states.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I remember coming down here the first time, and going back and tell Mom and saying, Mom, we found this place. These tiny little houses. And it’s full of cages and it smells really weird. It’s gross. And she’s like, oh, that was the old mink farm.

BRIAN: This is Grace Molteni. She and her sister Megan grew up near an abandoned mink farm in Wisconsin. They recently went back to visit.

FEMALE SPEAKER: Dude. It’s gone. That is a field of corn.

BRIAN: And things have changed a bit. But as kids, they would sneak onto the old farm, imagining what it was like in its heyday.

FEMALE SPEAKER: I guess in my head, it was like, oh, they being groomed, and they get showers and baths. And they brush them and make their fur so nice. It’s a mink farm, where they go to live happily and out their life. And we’re they’re ready to go, and they age, then they can decide, oh, you’ve lived a good life, mink. It’s time for you to become a coat. Would you like to be a coat? I think I’d like to be a muff instead. That’s what being on a mink farm was.

And then you look and see cages. That’s probably not, maybe that’s not the nice life that they had.

BRIAN: The demand for mink came on the tail end of what’s known as the age of extermination, when wealthy Americans covered themselves with all sorts of animal skins, from seal to beaver pelts. Mink, it turned out, were easier to tame and feed than other mammals. By 1940, nearly 300,000 mink were being killed each year in the United States for their fur.

FEMALE SPEAKER: It was just a bunch of raised up buildings with cages inside. There’s never anything in the cages. There weren’t fancy brushes and fancy grooming stations. There weren’t anything like that. There wasn’t a walking area for the minks to get exercise, or they could go out for a jaunt and stay fit. It was just locked up pages. Similar to a chicken coop, almost.

BRIAN: But eventually, like all forms of fashion, the tide turned against mink. And it turned against fur more generally. By the early 1960s, mink represented, well, an older, stodgier form of femininity.

A fur was something that a husband thought to glam up his wife, as a sort of marker of ownership. With the rise of modern feminism, coupled with the rise of environmentalism, mink coats and mink farming became relics of a more violent past. And the farms, well, they started to disappear.

FEMALE SPEAKER: You had to use your imagination. Oh, maybe they got smart. And maybe they got out. [LAUGHTER]

FEMALE SPEAKER: The minks of NIMH.

FEMALE SPEAKER: The minks of NIMH.

Special thanks to Megan Molteni  for producing that story. If you have a special place where history happened back in your hometown, write to us about it. Write to us at backstoryradio.org. And maybe we’ll put it on the radio.