In my hobby of identifying vintage aerial photos taken of the rural areas in the US I often come across little tidbits of information. Yesterday I finally pinned down a simple brick building in Holmes County, Ohio, an Amish area.
It turned out to be Troyer’s Trail Bologna shop. If you search for trail bologna you will find it is slightly different then the usual bologna with a coarser grind. But why is it called “trail” bologna? It sounds like came from something the pioneers carried on the trail. But no. It is made in the tiny community of Trail, Ohio.
Yep, Trail bologna is precisely the coarsely ground meat made in Trail, Ohio. Not sure why this local specialty caught on versus all the others. It’s a remnant of a great diversity of foods made in tiny, isolated hamlets across the U.S. They’ve mostly been assimilated away by easier communication and travel.
For cold lunch meat, I prefer the more usual finely ground. But Trail bologna grills up nice to make a hot bologna and cheese sandwich.
FYI - That building is still operating as Troyer’s Trail Bologna’s Shop in Dundee, OH (formerly Trail, OH). We are not from anywhere near the area but were vacationing through there. As we were driving, we kept seeing signs for this. We had the same WTF is Trail Bologna question. We stopped at Troyer’s. We bought some and asked the people working there why it is called Trail. “Not sure. I think maybe it’s good for hiking.” We didn’t learn the actual answer until we looked it up either.
On first read I expected it was a euphemism for something disgusting, similar to “buffalo chips” or “prison oysters”. Trail bologna, maybe cuts of a found carcass that are fresh enough to be edible, but aged just enough to be interesting.
