We raised chickens for eggs until the early 1970s on the Waschke Homestead. About this time of year—around Halloween—family and neighbors on Waschke Road would gather one night with flashlights to sneak up on sleeping chickens. For the kids, it was exciting, for the adults, necessary work.
The process started in the spring with the arrival of a batch of newly hatched baby chicks. I can’t remember where Grandpa (Gus) got them. There were several chicken hatcheries in the county and I assume they came from one of them. The hatchlings came in corrugated cardboard boxes and went immediately into the brooder house, which hasn’t been used for at least fifty years now and has fallen into decay.
The first few weeks of life, the chicks stayed under the brooder hood, a sheet metal canopy about six feet long and three feet wide, suspended by a block and tackle from the rafters so it could be raised and lowered easily. The hood was heated with electric light bulbs. As chicks get older, they need less heat. By raising the hood a little bit each day, the chicks were kept at the right temperature. Before the chicks arrived, Grandpa would go over the brooder house, patching with tin any holes a rat could through. Predatory rats could eat several chicks in a single night if they could get into the brooder house. As spring turned to summer, the chicks were allowed first to roam around the brooder house, then let into a roofed area enclosed in chicken wire, later they went into a fenced yard surrounding the brooder house. By fall, the chicks, now pullets, were allowed to roam freely and seldom entered the brooder house. Most roosted in the orchard at night.
The chickens roamed all around the farmyard during the summer. Those free roaming young birds got me in big trouble once. One day, I caught one. For some unknowable reason, I thought it would fit perfectly in the glove compartment of our navy blue 1952 Dodge pickup. I tested my theory and found it correct. Later, Dad heard a chicken cackle when he started the pickup. He found the chicken and several days droppings in the glove compartment. I don’t remember my punishment, but I have never put a chicken in a glove compartment again.
As the days grew cooler and the nights longer, we began to keep an eye open for newly laid eggs in the yard. These eggs were often small, misshapen, or double-yoked as the pullets got the hang of laying. When we had found enough eggs, the young birds were ready to go into the regular chicken house and start producing eggs for sale.
The fun began with a long-distance call to Wallace Poultry on Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, where The Bagelry is now. Wallace bought the old hens and butchered them. By the time the old flock was ready to be replaced, the hens were looking bedraggled and, I imagine, were quite tough.
Throughout the year, Mom or Grandma would occasionally butcher and pluck a nice-looking hen for dinner but we didn’t eat much poultry on the farm. Neither my mom or grandma liked butchering and plucking chickens. According to them, chicken dinners were not worth all the trouble.
When it was time to replace the flock, the tough old hens were not candidates for the kitchen. Although the baby chicks were supposed to be all female, a few roosters always made it past the chick sexers, and they supplied all the poultry Mom and Grandma wanted to deal with through the summer and fall.
I always hoped the Wallace Poultry truck would arrive after I came home from school. The truck driver had a folding wire fence that he set up inside the chicken house and we would chase chickens into a corner and corral them with the wire fence. The driver grabbed the corralled chickens by the legs and loaded them into crates on his truck. When all the chickens were crated, he drove off, the chickens never to be seen again. Wallace Poultry was still in existence after we quit raising chickens, but Mom would never buy poultry from them because she remembered those scrawny old birds that they used to get from us.
During the year, one of my jobs was to clean the chicken house and spread fresh straw litter on Saturday mornings, a job I hated, and, I suspect, I didn’t do very well. After the Wallace Poultry truck left and the chicken house was empty, Dad would take a couple days to give it a thorough cleaning, removing every bit of litter, taking apart the laying nests, hosing everything down, spraying with carbolineum to eradicate mites and other parasites, then brightening the place up with hastily applied slaked lime white wash.
Crating the old chickens was more fun than cleaning the chicken house but the real fun came after the chicken house was cleaned and it was time to introduce the new hens to the chicken house. The new chickens were wild by fall; even with bribes of wheat or oats, you couldn’t get closer than a few feet. Catching a few with a leg hook was possible, but with two hundred birds to catch, hooking them would take too long.
Instead, we would wait for night when the chickens were sleeping in the orchard.
The men would use flashlights to spot the roosting birds and reach up and grab them by the legs. The chickens roosted close together and it was easy to grab two or three at a time. The caught birds would cackle and screech, but the others ignored them and obligingly waited to be caught. When I was big enough, my job was to carry the chickens from the catchers to the chicken house feed room, where I deposited them into a wooden barrel with a lid to keep them captured.
My grandpa would reach into the barrel, grab a chicken, give it a worming pill and let it loose in the chicken house proper. Getting those pills down the outraged birds was harder than it looked. Grandpa did it in one smooth motion before the chicken knew what was happening. When I tried, the wriggling bird drew blood with its beak and claws and got loose before I could shove the pill down its throat. After one failure, I left it to Grandpa.
When Grandpa died, Dad quit raising chicks and bought birds that were dewormed and ready to start laying.
There were almost always a few stragglers that eluded capture for a few days. I remember one year, a hen stayed loose until Christmas when Dad asked a neighbor to come over and shot it with a shotgun in return for the meat. My mother was very clear that she was not interested in plucking and dressing a chicken brought down by a shotgun blast.