Peter Pugh did a lot of different work for the Dupui family, everything from killing hogs to hauling wheat, bundling oats, weighing flour, cutting grass, making plows, and priming wagon wheels.  He wasn't necessarily just a resident butcher.

But animals did need to be processed for food on the frontier.  So what types of animals were part of the local diet?  What can Dupui's ledger tell us?

As cow's milk (20 shillings) was purchased by Daniel Schoonmaker, we do know that dairy products were part of the area diet.  And as expected, both purchases and sales of cows do appear in the ledger record (as did sales of cow hides).  Similarly, with the large number of deerskins noted in these ledger transactions, one can safely conclude that deer meat was part of the local diet as well.

The favorite meat of the populace, however, was pork (with 725 pounds of "the other white meat" sold).  Second, in terms of weight sold, was beef (at 217 pounds).  Third, was bacon (131 pounds). While the 18th century was known to have had butcher shops, we cannot find any specific reference within Dupui's ledger to any such establishment within this region.

The closest we come to the possibility of a butcher shop is the occasional entry that will state, for example, paid "by 14 pounds of mutton". All that we really know, to a high degree of certainty, is that, per the ledger, area hogs were killed in February... and if you expected to have pork all year long, you most certainly needed both a smokehouse and preservative salt.  As pork, in fact, was sold on a year-round basis (with sales recorded in months such as May, June and October), one must necessarily conclude that area smokehouses indeed were constructed.  Ideally, one would have had a tub into which fresh salted cuts would have been placed, but the ledger doesn't report those in the area until 1784.  Presumably, pegs, nails, hooks and chains were used for hanging the meat.