I often look around the things we use and question “why?”.  I guess that is why I am made for museum work!  The perennial question from me is “why?”

Here’s a little “Information Minute” for you-

The invention of the piggy bank originates to over 600 years ago when people would used pots to store what money they had. In that time, metal was an expensive commodity and not frequently used for household equipment. Household items such as plates and pots were made from an affordable clay called ‘pygg’.  People would drop their spare coin into their clay “pygg” pots.

A funny little tidbit to this is that pigs actually rolled around in pygg clay…so it just seems fitting that the little clay pots that held spare coin started to take the shape of our little farm yard friends. Over the next few hundred years people slowly forgot that ‘pygg’ referred to the clay and not the animal.