The farmland near West Frankfort, Illinois, is a strange starting point for a figure in the history of the U.S. Navy, more than a thousand miles distant from the nearest ocean. Even stranger is who, or rather what, that figure was and how much he contributed to a battleship that was never built.
On Sherman Boner’s farm in 1942, one of his hogs produced a litter of 12 piglets. Boner’s young daughter Patty picked out a red and white newborn and raised him for her 4-H Club project. Patty Boner named the pig Parker Neptune. After she showed him in the 4-H competition, her father donated the animal to Don Lingle, a naval recruiter in the nearby town of Marion.
The story might have ended there if Lingle had gone ahead with plans to make the pig the star attraction at a fund-raising barbecue. But the recruiter decided to change the pig’s name to King Neptune, dress him in a Navy blanket, silver crown, and earrings, and use him to sell war bonds.
With the help of L. Oard Sitter, a professional auctioneer from Anna, Illinois, Lingle and King Neptune traveled throughout the state. Sitter auctioned the pig to bidders, who donated him back to the Navy. King Neptune was sold and returned many times, and even his squeal was auctioned for $25.
The funds were designated for the construction of the USS Illinois. The vessel originally was slated to be a Montana-class battleship but changing conditions led the Navy to redesign her as a faster Iowa-class battleship with added antiaircraft firepower and a narrower beam to squeeze through the Panama Canal. The project began in the Philadelphia Navy Yard in December 1942. The Illinois would have displaced 45,000 tons, stretched nearly 900 feet, and supported a crew of 151 officers and 2,637 enlisted manning nine 16-inch guns, 20 5-inch guns, and 129 antiaircraft weapons. The Illinois was budgeted to cost $125 million over her planned three to four years of construction.
King Neptune more than did his part to pay for the ship. In 1943 Illinois Governor Dwight Green “bought” the pig for $1 million. Altogether, King Neptune raised $19 million in bonds for the Illinois. So many people wrote checks directly to the pig that Lingle was forced to make a rubber stamp of King Neptune’s hoofprint to endorse the donations.
At the end of the war the Illinois was still unfinished. King Neptune remained a star for a time on the fraternal-lodge circuit in southern Illinois, but by 1946 he was headed for the stockyards. Rather than allow him to end up on someone’s table, Lingle took the King to live at the farm of Ernest Goddard near Anna, and the porcine celebrity held on for another four years before contracting pneumonia just shy of his eighth birthday.
The Illinois’ construction had been officially halted in August 1945. Unlike some of her sister ships, which were reconfigured for the Navy’s changing mission, what there was of the Illinois sat neglected and unused until she was finally broken up in 1958. The bell that would have been installed on her survives at the University of Illinois Memorial Stadium, where Navy ROTC students ring it when the Fighting Illini score.
King Neptune fared no better than the ship for which he tirelessly worked. He was buried, albeit with military honors, under an inaccurate marker (it had the year of birth wrong). Over the years the gravestone was vandalized, and his remains eventually were moved for a highway-construction project. But today, at the Trail of Tears Welcome Center on northbound I-57, just north of Exit 31 for Anna, a new, improved stone-mounted plaque quietly sits, largely unobserved, in the shade of oak boughs. And it offers lasting tribute to “King Neptune: 1942—1950. Navy Mascot Pig.”