By Virginia L. Terrell, in News and Observer
Miss Jessie Thompson doesn’t look a bit different from all the other women of North Carolina who have passed their days between the house and the store and the church, with a circle meeting thrown in every other Thursday for amusement, and, probably a choir practice on Friday night for social activity. In fact, she looked just a little more timid and retiring, and was just a little smaller and more frail looking than all the other healthy farm women at the convention last week at State College.
At least, that was the way Miss Jessie might have appeared during the first day of the meeting, but on the second she came into her own, and cast around her head a glow of adventure that transformed the black silk dress which she wore into a hoopskirt of the eighties, that placed on the neatly brushed light hair a big sunbonnet, and transformed the Ford which brought Miss Jessie up from Columbus county into a covered prairie schooner. With her first few words, Miss Jessie brought before the women of the convention the flavor of pioneer days, proved good her title on two counts—a pioneer of the old school in a government claim in Colorado, and a pioneer of the new school on a chicken farm in Columbus county.
Miss Jessie’s adventures in chicken raising have reached out beyond the confines of North Carolina plowed fields into the snowy mountains of the west, where many years ago she nursed in vain the beginning of a chicken farm that has since made her famous and financially independent.
It was back before 1900, Miss Jessie doesn’t say just how far, that she and her mother moved up in the mountains on the government claim, and spent the first six weeks snowed under, seeing but one person, a neighbor who lived probably several mountains away, who came over in her snow shoes one day to welcome the new family. And she promised the little girl that as soon as spring broke, she should have a chicken from her brood.
Not That Sort of Chicken
‘I named the chick Nanny, and boasted of the time that I would have an egg for breakfast every day. When Nanny crowed instead of cackling, I was disappointed, but still coaxed him away from the rest of the chickens and gave him special food, which was a poor policy, for one Sunday he furnished the chief attraction on the dinner table, and my first chicken venture had failed.”
But Nanny had become immortal, for of the thousands of chickens which Miss Jessie had raised and sold, she has never had any but Plymouth Rocks and the farm down in Columbus county is a living monument to Nanny who so many years ago thrived and was eaten on a mountain top in Colorado.
That was the way the “Chicken Lady” got started in the business which has today been built up to a thriving trade that finds her chickens on the tables of many North Carolina and Virginia homes.
In 1896 Miss Jessie and her mother joined the Sunny South Colony and headed for North Carolina, with all their worldly possessions in two trunks. But some of the colonists brought their livestock, and again the interest in poultry was revived. The Thompson family brought four hens and a rooster. That was the foundation of the present day flock.
For many years there was no incentive to raise chickens for the market, for the folks didn’t want to pay more than 25 cents for a hen, regardless of size. But then the country began to prosper, and the reward for keeping her flock purebred Plymouth Rock began to come in. Miss Jessie began to get 50 cents for a Plymouth hen to the great indignation of those who raised scrubs and instead(?) that a hen was a hen. She had her troubles at competition, but they never really bothered her, and she kept right on raising her hens in spite of the woman who insisted that it cost just as much to raise a little hen as a big one, and if Jessie Thompson got 50 cents for hers, she would certainly get 50 cents for her own. And that was that.
Incubator for $5
But equipment had to be bought, and the chicken raiser heard of a friend who was tired of the business and wanted to sell an incubator for $5. So she bought it. She got 98 chickens the first time, and the adventures that Miss Jessie had with those first chickens would make any city business woman ashamed of herself. She didn’t have a brooder, but gave about 60 of them to a hen, and took the others in the house at night and covered them with a feather cushion. That was fine in good weather, but when it rained and the old hen couldn’t cover up all the brood of 60, and right in the midst of the shower Miss Jessie would have to torn out and gather up a bucketful and put them in the oven to dry.
And then every year, she had to raise about 50 extra chicks to feed the hawks. She tried every kind of scarecrow without any success, until “Tige” appeared. Tige was name for Buster Brown’s dog in the funny papers. He came without ceremony one day, and has remained ever since, a tramp dog of the ugliest variety, but at the same time, one of the most faithful. He has trained the family collie now, and between the two of them, nothing bigger than a mockingbird slights on the Thompson chicken yard.
The Pleased Customer
At the end of 1917, when the chicken business first began to be profitable, the account book showed sales amounting to $148.44 in eggs and chickens. At the beginning of 1922 there was a new 100-hen house ready for the pullets, with two rooms and a feed rooms; there was a 250-egg Buckeye incubator; a coal-burning brooder, an oil brooder; and an account that reached $1,023.71. From the time she began to enlarge her plant she paid for every pound of feed and for all the labor required in the care of the chickens.
Miss Jessie’s policy is based on the belief that a pleased customer is worth more than seven consecutive insertions in the daily paper, and she illustrates by telling of a man to whom she shipped a fine rooster. The rooster’s beauty was marred by a slightly defective comb, and the customer’s pet aversion was ugly combs, so he sent it back for exchange, and got the Beau Brummel of the flock. Miss Jessie’s courtesy has resulted in a big business in that part of the State.
But with all of her success in the business it is of other women that Miss Jessie still thinks. Says she:
“Most of us women want something that is MINE, not OURS, so I want to tell them if they are really chicken-minded, if the poultry page is the most interesting thing in the paper, if they can set an old hen with patience and 15 eggs and not want to sling her off her nest when she picks their hands; if they can burnup their mistakes this year with the determination to have more chicks and fewer mistakes next, then they will be justified in going ahead and building up, not buying, as large a flock as they can handle, for in due time we shall reap if we faint not.”
Story from the Raleigh News and Observer, as reprinted on page 2 of the Whiteville News Reporter, Sept. 11, 1924
www.blogger.com/view-follower.g?followerID=01346969522846125360&blogID=8493267847537044513
No comments:
Post a Comment