Appalachian History

Stewart A. Cody worked as the Jackson County, WV County Agent in the early 1900s. The West Virginia Historical Photograph Collection possesses 36 images which were pulled from a photo album of his dated 1912.

As County Agent, Cody spent a great deal of time with the local chicken farmers, and the captions of these 36 photos, taken as a whole, provide a detailed insight into the practices of that time.

The greatest interest in poultry, Cody tells us, is shown by the farmers living in the 'runs' and 'forks.’ On a typical 'ridge' farm, the farm land is rougher and the farms are further apart. More incentive to raise poultry than crops.

Cody undoubtedly knew all the players countywide: from Mr. O. M. Stone in Cottageville, “the largest as well as the most profitable poultry farm in Jackson County,” on down to Mr. W. L. Ball, who built his poultry house out of logs.

The Stone’s residence was built from the proceeds of the farm’s egg sales. The two girls, Cody noted, “add $100 to the family purse by washing and grading the eggs.” Mr. Stone’s laying house number 2 held 300 hens, and was ten feet wide and 100 feet long, a bit wider and far longer than the average area laying house. It cost $125 to build.

O. M. Stone Feeding his Chickens

We learn that local farmers commonly used three types of poultry houses adapted to the county. The first, a ‘Tolman house,’ was a simple shed roof house with either a paper or tin roof and open front, with a packed dirt floor covered with sand. One caption gives the length and width as 7' x 30'; another is 10' x 31'. Mr. J. R. Backer’s shed roof house had a tin roof, and three openings in the front 2'10" x 7'4". The use of galvanized roofing on poultry houses as well as other farm buildings was general throughout the county. It seemed to have the preference over paper roofing with the majority of farmers.

Cody felt C.D. Rice’s two-storied poultry house was “worthy of being used as a model by others in Jackson County desiring this type of house.” The birds are fed on the first floor in the winter. The nests are also on this floor while the perches are on the second floor. Very often Cody found nests on the outside of the houses, “undoubtedly the preference of the hens.”

The third type was a T-shaped house, whose roosting room intersected a scratching room. Cody describes a scratching room that is 14'6" x 8', and observes nest boxes, home-made hoppers, and sliding windows in it. Joining this at the middle of the side is a roosting shed 12' x 40'. Mr. T. H. Snider’s T-shaped house held 100-150 pure-bred Barred Rocks.

Reading across the various captions gives us a sense of the average density of birds in Jackson County poultry houses: Mr. W.A. McMurray housed 35 fowls in a 10’x 12’ house, Mr. W.R Glovers housed 27 in an 8’x13’ shed, and Mr. C.D. Rice housed 150 in his 12’x 24’ space.

Cody must’ve come across an awful lot of tumble down chicken coops, for he notes in one caption “This farm [in Jackson Run] stands out from its neighbors because of its neatness. Notice the trim, white washed poultry house.” Frank McPherson’s small brooder house also stood out in Cody’s descriptions: it had a universal hover, a type of colony brooder “considerable above the average.”

And what about earnings from poultry farming? Mr. W. H. Melhorn and Mrs. Hartley each marketed a case of eggs during the spring months. C.D. Rice’s total income for 1913 was $259.25; T. H. Snider’s 1912 sales amounted to $104.87. Almost as an aside, Cody observes that farmers did not consider the value of the poultry manure as a marketable fertilizer. “This is a general condition in certain parts of the county,” he said.

We learn that farmers who lived within one or two miles of the country store would take their poultry to market pulled in a small wagon by hand, if they didn’t own a horse, or get one of the children to carry a pail of eggs in, often “hauled several miles in the hot sun over rough country roads.”

Abe Price was a major county merchant to whom the farmers brought their products. His store in Cottageville handled from ten to forty cases of eggs a week, in addition to several coops of chicken. The town of Evans was another central dropoff point for farmers.

Wholesale buyers such as H.E. Beegle, of Ravenswood, would purchase cases at Evans, then haul the still uninspected eggs by wagon 7 miles to the railroad. From there the cases were shipped 10 miles to the Ravenswood storage facility. Once candled, the eggs would be loaded to a refrigerated train car for shipment to Pittsburgh.


source: West Virginia Historical Photographs Collection/West Virginia University Libraries

That spring, I gathered up suitable pieces of scrap lumber wherever they could be found in order to construct a brooder house. Many of these boards came from a discard pile of surplus materials at the mill where Daddy worked. He often reclaimed a lot of useful items that were otherwise destined to be hauled off to the town dump.

The seven by eight foot structure had a shed roof and was only five feet high at the back. The sacrifice of head room in the design limited the space to be heated during March and April. Initially, the only source of light was a large window installed at floor level. Its southern exposure brought an abundance of afternoon sunshine, providing some solar warmth before the balmy spring days arrived.

Our neighbor Bernard Butler sold us a small top-loading coal burning stove. A removable round sheet metal hover radiated the warmth downward.

Daddy suggested an easy way to hoist and securely dangle the stove in midair. He appended a wire bail to the hover and attached a snap buckle fastened to one end of a rope pulley. A lip on the top of the stove helped keep it suspended about six inches from the floor. This gap allowed the chirping chicks to go to and from the heat at will.

The lifting device was easy to operate and gave enough working room to remove the ashes from the stove as well as to clean the area where the chicks nightly huddled. A fresh bed of wood shavings every day restored the space to spic and span sanitary condition.

The stove had a regulating apparatus of sorts to control the updraft, which in turn helped govern the rate of combustion. There were two opposing mercury-filled metal chambers, each one shaped like a small pancake, that acted as a thermostat. Their expansion when heated caused the damper to open and slow the coal’s burning rate. As they contracted, the closed system got the fire going again.

This assemblage wasn’t perfect. When falling temperatures called for more heat, the movable plates that regulated the draft didn’t always respond properly. Also, the small stove required constant restoking. Given these circumstances, the habitat of my little charges needed fairly constant monitoring, both day and night. The first two weeks were critical, a time when young chicks are really susceptible to chills, and the greatest losses occur.

My vigil began several days before the cute fuzzy chicks arrived. I lit the stove, kept the fire going to dry out any dampness, and made sure everything was hunky dory. Maintaining a uniform environment demanded discipline. Once we settled the chicks in the brooder, I had to set an alarm clock and get up at least twice on the chilliest nights to keep close check on our investment. Once I had dressed and bundled up for these nocturnal visits, a bright beam from a flashlight pointed the way. Sometimes the heavens, luminous with the full moon’s radiance, projected my shadow along the pathway.

Opening the door to discover cozy warmth insider the brooder house both soothed my shivers and reassured me that all was well. I routinely added more coal and waited for the embers to burn brightly before returning to the house and crawling back into bed.


Excerpt from 'The Day is Far Spent,' by Kenneth A. Tabler, Montani Publishing, 2006
b. 1926, Martinsburg, WV



chicken+house farm+chores appalachia appalachia+history history+of+appalachia

“There's a big old . . . there's a big old boar possum come in here. I . . . I couldn't believe it. I didn't know what it was. And it come in here and in four days, I believe, three or four days, he killed . . . in my chickenhouse out there he killed sixteen big hens. He come out there and he'd knock 'em off of the roost and all the . . . all he got was the head.

“And I couldn't figure what it was, you know. I thought it was a . . . I thought it must be a weasel or . . . so one night I backed my truck down there . . . I backed my truck out there and backed down there where I could see and I . . . I was sitting out there in the back of the truck a laying for him.

“And he come around the barn, come in there. He went in there, buddy, and he knocked two of them chickens off of that roost. He come around that barn so fast I couldn't . . . I couldn't tell . . . I looked . . . I said, "That looked like a big possum." Well, this dog was there and by time I come around he got gone, and that made sixteen of them big hens, buddy, in four days. He'd come in there and knock 'em off the roost. I'd go out there and they'd just be laying there.

“So I fastened everything up, and where you first come in the barn, you know, there . . . he . . . he had the hole in the lower side down where he come in the chickenhouse. I went out there and I set me a big trap, a big double-jaw trap down there, and sure enough I walked out there the next morning, there he was. Buddy, that . . . I mean that was a big long-legged possum. I never . . . I didn't know a possum would . . . would catch a chicken. And I had a big old ball peen hammer and I walked around there. Possums are hard to kill. And [chuckle] I said, ‘Son, I'm going to give you a lick for every chicken that you killed from me.’ "

Clarence R. Wells
Family Farm Oral History Project
University of Kentucky
http://tinyurl.com/25p45j


possum clarence+r.+wells appalachian+history appalachian+culture history+of+appalachia appalachia